Dr. Cavallo did serve under Carlos Menem and then under Fernando de La Rúa, as Finance Minister. The Argentine press was not kind to him, and the echoes of accusations of irresponsible handling of the economy were heard all the way to London's Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. But Dr. Cavallo was well received by the audience at the Union League of Philadelphia. The reception to his explanations as to how the so-called Convertibility Plan failed and collapsed the economy, was generally positive although in the question and answer session that followed some words of disagreement were heard. 

One of the questioners suggested that Dr. Cavallo was evading responsibility for the actions that destroyed the economic foundations of his country.  The former minister answered by admitting that he did indeed bear some responsibility but insisted on the point that he intended to bring to his audience that the collapse was caused by a series of unexpected developments related to the ever unpredictable vicissitudes and fluctuation of the currencies. The fact that the peso was pegged to the dollar and then the government froze the bank accounts of thousands of Argentina's depositors contributed to the loss of faith in the managing institutions. That is what the former Finance Minister said on November 16th. On November 18th, the newspaper headlines announced Argentina's decision to default on its loan payments to the World Bank. This fact will not make it any easier for the government of Eduardo Duhalde to reach an agreement with the International Monetary Fund. On November 15th, Alfredo Atanasof, representing the cabinet, announced that Argentina would refuse " to accept the policy of savage budget adjustments as a strategy for getting over its problems".

The IMF is unhappy with the Duhalde's government lack of implementation of the required economic reforms. This latest default, combined with one of the larges defaults in history when the government failed to meet its obligation of $140 billion to the private sector, places the Duhalde administration on a perilous course. 

The government is risking that the World Bank and other financial institutions will refuse to extend credit to Argentina which would be a fatal blow for the economy. In his speech in Philadelphia, Domingo Cavallo explained that one of the immediate solutions to Argentina's problems was to restore faith in the system by releasing the bank accounts frozen by the government and pegging the peso to the dollar and the euro. After this latest development those adjustments seem meaningless and Argentina's economy may collapse entirely bringing on a political crisis.