Hello! Hope you’ve had a great week.

What’s a few billion between allies? The Trump administration has political motives for propping up Argentina’s currency, but the plan could leave American taxpayers holding the bag. We’ll talk about it in today’s newsletter, along with a bunch of other stories you need to read to make your dollar stretch further.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed the U.S. signed a $20 billion currency swap to prop up the Argentine peso on Tuesday. The goal? To raise the peso’s value on foreign exchange markets.

The Argentine peso is in trouble because, well, people don’t want it.

“The currency is woefully over-valued,” said Mark Sobel, U.S. chair of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum. “And the market has lost confidence that the value of the currency is sustainable or tenable.”

A bedraggled peso is a problem for Argentina’s government, which is about to face an election.

“If the peso falls, there’ll be an uptick in inflation in Argentina,” said Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The price of imports will go up. The price of all things will go up.”

Not good if you’re trying to win an election. 

The way you prop up a currency is by going and buying a bunch of it. “When you buy something, or when you bid on something, the price tends to go up,” Setser said.

That’s what the U.S. has been doing — in a very unusual move, by the way. Just buying pesos.

“The U.S. has had to spend a decent amount of money, estimates are close to a half billion, maybe more, and it hasn’t actually had that much of an impact on the currency,” Setser said.

Peter Roof is fed up. The Marketplace listener wrote in from Arlington, Virginia, to ask:

Why are companies abandoning customer service? Some never really had it… Was the cost beyond having a service facade not worth it?

“The next agent will be available in two hours.”

Customers know the frustration of having to deal with long wait times or simply being unable to contact a company in the first place. Sometimes it’s a function of companies not wanting to expend their resources, and sometimes it’s by design. By tiring you out, it’ll make it harder for you to cancel that gym membership.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to profits.

“It’s customer disservice at this point,” said Erin Witte, director of consumer protection at the Consumer Federation of America. 

It also doesn’t help that some industries have become more consolidated over time. 

“Corporate concentration, I think, has really impacted the incentives of companies to focus much less on customer service, because they don't have to and they can make a whole lot more money if they don't,” Witte said. 

What’s a stock? Little pieces of a company, called a share, that the company itself sells to the public. If that company grows and makes money your piece can grow in value, too. 

So how do people make money in stocks? One way is through “share appreciation,” when you sell your stock for more than what you paid. The other is from “dividends.” That’s like a little thank-you gift the company pays its investors using extra cash. 

Are stocks risky? There are lots of ways to invest in the stock market, and which one you use depends on the level of risk you’re comfortable with, because shares can lose value, too. Experts say you shouldn’t invest more than you can stand to lose.

How do the pros manage risk? One way is index funds, which are like a variety pack of stocks. An index is basically a list of publicly traded companies along a theme. For example, the Nasdaq is mostly tech stocks or the S&P 500 includes 500 of the largest and best-performing American companies. 

What about meme stocks? They got big on social media the past few years, and they’re some of the most volatile and risky stock investments of all. Their short boost in value is based on internet fervor, not a solid business plan.

The price of gold has been on a tear for months, and even with this week’s dip it’s still over $4,000 an ounce and up more than 50% so far this year.