This study showed that the Trueque had a strong anti-cyclical component but other factors are necessary to explain its emergence and growth. In macroeconomic terms, there was no reason why the economic activity in the Trueque could not have taken place in the regular economy. In theory, there was no need for a special currency, since the resources (physical and intangible) were there.

So why did the production of the Trueque not occur in the regular economy? The difference lay in the institutions that governed the ‘active’ and the ‘idle’ (unemployed or not economically active) parts of the economy. The Trueque coordinated actors and resources into production and exchange in ways that the regular economy could not. It filled the institutional gaps left by the missing mediating mechanisms in the regular economy. Therefore it was not lack of resources that deepened the crisis in the Argentine economy and kept its agents unemployed, but the lack of institutions by which they could be coordinated. There was no impediment in the static conditions (that is, the resources available) but in the dynamic ones (coordination mechanisms). In short, lack of critical resources and downturns of the business cycle are not the only causes of unemployment. The lack of appropriate institutions to coordinate the use of resources also needs to be examined.

Following this reasoning, the participation of the disenfranchised middle class emerges as critical to the take-off of the Trueque. Participation in the regular market was not available to the new poor, who had no jobs and no other income. On the other hand, transferring goods and services as gifts or charity or within a reciprocity network, as often observed among the structural poor, was not an acceptable solution in a middle-class context. The Trueque took elements of both and adapted them in the club market: it mixed the institutions of the market with the social cohesion of a closed network. What would have been a gift became a commodity to exchange, though for community money, not regular money. Transfers were facilitated by the non-state money of those who accepted it by becoming traders in the club market.