A talented businessman, Frigerio nonetheless remained politically active, involving himself in intellectual circles and establishing a newsweekly in 1946, Qué pasó en siete dias ("What Happened in Seven Days").

Following the secret meeting in Caracas, however, Perón endorsed Arturo Frondizi, instructing his supporters to vote for their former opponent and forego casting blank ballots, as a number of Peronists were advocating.

Declining exports and a growing need for costly imported motor vehicles, machinery and fuel, moreover, had caused Argentina to run trade deficits in seven out the past ten years.

Unable to finance these easily, Frondizi's two predecessors, Perón and Pedro Aramburu, resorted to "printing" money to cover the nation's yawning current account deficits, causing prices to rise around sixfold.

As a consequence of investments initiated during the next four years, the profile of a number of sectors in the Argentine economy were revolutionized by the early 1960s:[2][5] The availability of consumer durables like washing machines, refrigerators, ovens, appliances and television sets all also increased sharply, as local and foreign investors soon broke ground on factories making all these goods and many more.

One of the policy makers behind this was a relatively unknown defense contractor named Alvaro Alsogaray, whose austerity plan Frondizi was forced to implement, causing a sudden doubling of consumer prices and, consequently, a fall in GDP and widespread protest.

Again influencing economic policy from his informal role, Frigerio's close working relationship with the president continued until, on March 28, 1962, Arturo Frondizi was deposed while attending a Western Hemisphere summit in Montevideo, Uruguay in hopes of mediating the conflict between the U.S. and Fidel Castro's Cuba.

[2] Arrested upon his return to the Casa Rosada the following morning, Frondizi defiantly pronounced that he would "not resign, nor commit suicide, or leave the country," the president was imprisoned and Frigerio, exiled in Uruguay.

Freezing wages for prolonged stretches, deregulating financial markets and encouraging a flood of foreign debt and of imports, these policies all helped undo much of what Frondizi and Frigerio had accomplished twenty years earlier.

Though Frigerio and his supporters were not targeted in the way left-wing dissidents were, the MID's opposition to the regime's chief economist, José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz and his policies earned a number of party officials death threats and forced exile.

[2] Allowing elections in 1983, the dictatorship left an insolvent Argentina, its business and consumer confidence almost shattered and its international prestige damaged following the 1982 Falklands War, an invasion Frigerio opposed.

[10] Having written thirty books and numerous articles concerning the Argentine economy, he was sidestepped by the Administration of Raúl Alfonsín and his policies were only partly adopted by the Administration of Carlos Menem and by Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo, whose reforms attracted foreign investment and helped lead to a sorely needed modernization of Argentine industry; Menem-era privatizations, however, yielded very mixed results and the combination of downsizing and higher productivity led to an increase in unemployment after 1992 that Frigerio felt was not being addressed.