the US dollar locally, which had risen around fifteenfold by July 1982 when Central Bank President Domingo Cavallo rescinded the policy. During the years of Cavallo's Convertibility Law, which established a 1:1 fixed exchange rate between the Argentine peso and the United States dollar on April 1, 1991, the BCRA was mainly in charge of keeping foreign currency reserves in synch with the monetary base. The policy deprived the Central Bank of exchange-rate flexibility, however, and ended at the depth of a record economic crisis a decade later. The repeal of the Convertibility Law in January 2002 was accompanied by a 70% devaluation and depreciation of the peso to nearly 4 pesos, and the Central Bank's role afterward was the accumulation of reserves in order to gain a measure of control of the exchange rate. The BCRA buys and sells dollars from the market as needed to absorb large foreign trade surpluses and keep the official exchange rate at internationally competitive levels for Argentine exports and to encourage import substitution. As part of a wider debt restructuring effort that brought Argentina out of its default three years earlier, in December 2005 President Néstor Kirchner announced the payment of Argentina's IMF debts in a single, anticipated disbursement. The payment was effected on January 3, 2006, employing about US$9.8 billion from BCRA reserves. This decreased the amount of reserves by one third, but did not cause adverse monetary effects, save from an increased reliance on the local bond market, which requires somewhat higher interest rates. The BCRA continued to intervene in the exchange market, usually buying dollars, though occasionally selling small amounts (for example, reacting to rumors of a possible increase of the Federal Reserve's reference rate, which caused a minor spike in the dollar's value). Its reserves reached US$28 billion in September 2006, recovering the levels prior to the IMF payment, and rose to US$32 billion at the close of the year. The exchange rate was maintained relatively undervalued, prompted by the BCRA's market intervention as a buyer. While fiscal policy remained fairly tight, monetary policy was highly expansionary with growth in Argentina's money supply of over 23% annually from 2003 to 2007. Citing its disapproval of this policy, the influential Global Finance magazine gave Martín Redrado, President of the Central Bank, a D grade in its October 2006 survey of global central bankers. The magazine held that Redrado "missed the