First, Martín Redrado, the governor of the Central Bank, was pushed out on January 29th, after a battle with the president over the bank’s dollar reserves. Ms Fernández ostensibly wanted to use the cash to reassure foreign investors about Argentina’s creditworthiness. If so, her government has achieved the opposite with its bullying of Mr Redrado, who was making a stand for central-bank independence—something investors tend to like. That his replacement will be Mercedes Marcó del Pont, an economist said to be close to the presidency, is also a discouraging sign.

Second, it emerged that in 2008, when the global financial crisis was at its height, Ms Fernández’s husband and predecessor as president, Néstor Kirchner, sold $2m worth of pesos and bought dollars. There was nothing illegal about this, and Mr Kirchner did declare the transaction. But the trade hardly expressed confidence in the government’s economic management.

Ms Fernández justified her raid on the reserves by saying that the Central Bank had more than it needed, because they exceeded the size of the monetary base. Economists disagree about what is an appropriate target for the reserves, but Mr Redrado’s view is that a highly dollarised emerging economy like Argentina’s needs an abundance of Treasury bonds (the form in which most reserves are held) as insurance. Even if Ms Fernández might find support from some economists for her argument, her plan to swap the dollar reserves for a non-transferable government bond would not.

Argentina’s economy is on course to rebound this year and grow at 3-5%. But the government is spending money so fast that this growth will not finance current spending on its own, says Daniel Marx, a former finance minister. Ordinarily, a government faced with a shortfall would turn to domestic and international bond markets. But this has been difficult since Argentina defaulted in 2002.

Yet if the government was just in search of cash, the timing is odd. It could have funded itself from domestic sources, such as the pension funds that it took over in 2008, Banco Nación (a public bank) and the Central Bank itself, without having to look further afield, says Daniel Volberg of Morgan Stanley, an investment bank. The evidence therefore points to a miscalculation by a president who rejects checks on her power and has given up listening to anyone outside her coterie of advisers.