This article presents an analysis of factors responsible for the Argentine crisis of 1999-2002. The first section of the study presents alternative approaches to underlying causes of the crisis, including mostly monetary and fiscal policy errors, wrong structure of the banking sector, as well as political or external shocks. The latter include, first of all, consequences of the Brazilian crisis, the dollar appreciation against the euro and unfavourable terms of trade. Emphasis has been put on controversy accompanying the specification of factors which finally resulted in the outbreak of the crisis and determined its scale. The second section deals with a description of measures which might have averted the crisis, but had not been implemented for various reasons. The failure to apply remedies at the right time resulted in the crisis tuning into an economic and social disaster.