other large consumer durables and the creation of a national small-business lender (BANADE), Ferrer secured increased collective bargaining rights for Argentine labor (the bast-paid and most-unionized in Latin America at the time) and became a household word in Argentina with his ads encouraging consumers to Compre Nacional! ("Buy Domestic"). Having entered a mild recession following a boom in 1968–69, growth reaccelerated in late 1970 and early 1971, despite the worst drought since 1952. Ferrer presented President Levingston a five-year plan in September in the hope of giving his new program a permanence seldom seem in Argentine policy and it earned him appointment as full Minister of the Economy in October, as well as the support of former President Arturo Frondizi and of economist Rogelio Julio Frigerio, a pro-development businessman close to Frondizi. Levingston's political designs, the most controversial of which was to be the replacement of Argentina's myriad political parties with four Presidentially-sanctioned alliances, led to his replacement in March 1971. Ferrer was initially retained by the new president, Alejandro Lanusse. Ferrer's efforts to discourage speculative practices entrenched in Argentine farming such as hoarding and underproduction drew opposition from the powerful beef and grain lobbies, however, and the latter responded by forming an advocacy group, the United Farmland Movement (MCU); these pressure groups helped lead to the Economy Minister's dismissal in late May. Later career Ferrer returned to academics and to his work with CLACSO, writing an economic history, The Postwar (1982), and Living Within Our Means (1983), an appeal for alternatives to dependence on foreign investment. Following a financial collapse, Argentina's last dictatorship called for elections in 1983. The winner, Raúl Alfonsín of the centrist Radical Civic Union (UCR), appointed Ferrer President of the Bank of the Province of Buenos Aires, the public, second-largest bank in Argentina. Limited by a shortfall in confidence in the Argentine banking system (whose deposits were dwarfed by Argentine deposits abroad) and growing differences with Alfonsín's conservative economists, Ferrer resigned in 1987. Contributing regularly to the Economy section of Clarín, Argentina's most important news daily, he became an increasingly renowned opponent of globalization, capturing what he saw as its contradictions in A History of Globalization in 1996, and criticizing its dependence on slave labor in From Columbus to the Internet: Globalization in Latin America (2000). He organized like-minded economists in his new NGO, Grupo Fénix the same year. The May 2003 election of Peronist