The blue dollar fell $7 this Thursday, December 29, and closed at $350, whereupon he provided a breather and broke a streak of five consecutive rises. The informal dollar on the eve had ended at a record value of $357, although in some areas of the country the price had exceeded $360.
In turn, the financial dollars that are negotiated in the stock market -counted with liquidation and MEP- ended with mixed results. The CCL closed at $340.55 and the MEP at $334.36, which implies a drop of 1.6% and a slight rise of 0.8%, respectively.
Market operators say that all these days official intervention was noticed through the sale of bonds to lower the closing price of financial currencies in the final leg of the wheel.
In this sense, a broker commented that “in the final part of the wheel a fairly strong intervention came out, lowering the MEP”. meanwhile, in Aurum Values they pointed out that it was “Another day of very high volume traded in the GD30 where the selling position against pesos to lower the MEP affects bond parities”.
Added to this climate of decompression of the blue dollar, the Central Bank registered on Thursday a net purchase balance of US$539 million in the official exchange market, the largest purchase in six months, and that within the framework of the soybean dollar 2, the The soybean sector contributed foreign currency for US$177 million, with which the objective of the measure of achieving a liquidation of US$3,000 million was already achieved.
Blue dollar: logical truce
In this context, the analysts considered the drop in the value of the blue dollar “logical” after the escalation in the last week driven by a greater demand due to the collection of the Christmas bonus, from people who are about to go on vacation abroad, the payment of the cards with the expenses of those who traveled to the World Cup in Qatar, and in a scenario of shortage of supply that caused the start of the dollar for foreign tourism.
After closing at a record value of $357 on Wednesday, the blue dollar today broke its 5-day bullish streak and was at $350
In this regard, the financial analyst christian buteler He assessed that “it is logical that after such a strong rise, it should go down a bit”.
“Given what went up, I wouldn’t be surprised if he drops a couple more pesos, he could get to rest a little more before resuming the climb.”estimated.
Salvador Vitelli, A specialist in finance and agribusiness, he agreed that “the rise these days was quite dizzying and he had to take a breather” and he also believes that “there should be a few days of calm.”
Among the reasons for the fall of the informal dollar, the economist Frederick Glustein He maintained that “yesterday the peso market dried up quite a bit as a result of a very good Treasury debt tender that allowed a rollover of more than 500% and with it, avoid that migration to the blue that is so feared.”
For her part, the economist Natalia Motyl He affirmed that another of the reasons that “is affecting the drop in parallel dollars is that many buy Argentine bonds at the end of the year to avoid paying the Personal Assets tax.”
Temporary or lasting relief for the blue dollar?
However, specialists anticipate that the drop in the blue is a “temporary respite” by assuring that “the underlying trend is upward” because it is still behind in real terms, and because the largest monetary issue in December will put pressure on the parallel dollars.
Some analysts linked the drop in the blue to the good debt tender the day before that dried up the market in pesos
In that sense, buteler He argued that “what was surprising is not that the blue dollar has risen, but the speed with which it did so in a short time” and predicted that “it could drop a bit from this rise that it had but the underlying trend continues to be upwards.”
“There has not been any measure that you can see that is going to change that. He may take a break, but it is temporary, he will resume the bullish path, the only path it has is upwards until inflation, the issuance of pesos, the stocks, loosen up”plot
With the same diagnosis, the financial analyst Gustavo Ber He commented that after the rearrangement of the last wheels, “the financial and free dollars would seem to be seeking to take a breather – in the midst of interventions that accelerated on the closing of the wheels – although this does not stop dollarization.”
“Beyond the breaks on the way, the financial and free dollars should in the current context – and the multiple challenges ahead – continue with the upward readjustment, with a floor rate of the economy’s nominality to avoid accentuating the accumulated backwardness” , he predicted.
For Vitelli, “the pause that the blue made is logical but it is transitory, but in the short to medium term, the free dollar will inevitably tend to rise due to the amount of pesos that are being issued.”
“In real terms we are well below what some prices were, for example, the value of $338 on July 22, 2022 -in the midst of the financial crisis after the resignation of Martín Guzmán and his replacement by Silvina Batakis- today is equivalent to a price above $400″.
For analysts, the respite of the blue is temporary and the underlying trend is bullish
For its part, Motyl said that with the blue “there was an overshooting effect that ended up correcting downwards, we are still in a seasonal period of greater demand for pesos in which savings in dollars are used to meet expenses for the parties, vacations, but it does not mean that after the holidays there will be upward pressure again”
In this regard, the economist judged that “today, a dollar at $350 is cheap” and anticipates that the soybean 2 dollar issue “will end up putting pressure on the exchange market in the coming days.”
For Glustein, this relief from the blue may “last since in the first half of January there is usually less demand for foreign currency due to the drop in activity, although due to the dynamics of the local economy it is likely that there may be changes.”
