Tuesday April 25, 2023 | 7:27 p.m.
The parallel dollar registered its biggest daily rise in 10 months on Tuesday, jumping $33 to close at $495 for sale, after registering a nominal all-time high of $497. The gap with the value of the official dollar marketed by Banco Nación reached 124.1%, the highest level since July 28, 2022, a few weeks after the departure of Martín Guzmán from the Ministry of Economy, when he touched 145%. .
Despite this, there were records from different parts of the country where the dollar was sold at $520 (Mar del Plata) and other places where even the caves paralyzed the sale during the day on Tuesday. In the midst of this tension, the Minister of Economy Sergio Massa announced that different tools that he has at his disposal were going to be used to contain the price of financial dollars. And after this announcement, the Financial Information Unit (UIF) and the National Securities Commission (CNV) carried out raids on the offices of a financial company in downtown Buenos Aires.
For his part, President Alberto Fernández blamed “the right” for what is happening in the financial market. Fernández pointed to the referents of the opposition to the collapse of the peso against the dollar in the informal market. “Sometime the right should think of Argentina before its business and political interests. With Minister (of Economy) Sergio Massa we are working to face this scenario,” the president said during a joint press conference with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis, who is visiting the country.
The president pointed against economic referents of the Together for Change coalition as drivers of the currency run in recent days.” “They install rumors in the morning, they operate throughout the day and when the afternoon ends they withdraw their profitability from the exchange market and hurt thus the savings of the majority of Argentines. They have always done the same,” the president also stated.
Massa and all the tools
The Minister of Economy Sergio Massa affirmed during the afternoon that he will use all the tools of the State “to order this situation.” He did so through a message on his personal Twitter account.
Massa also announced that the government will again discuss aspects of the agreement signed in 2022 with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to refinance the debt of some 44,000 million dollars taken by the government of the conservative Mauricio Macri (2015-2019), and that this intention has already been notified to the agency. In addition, he announced that the government will resort to economic criminal justice to investigate alleged destabilizing operations.
Convulsions in the exchange market, which are common in Argentina in pre-electoral periods, occur in a context of accelerated inflation. In March the price increase was 7.7% and in the interannual comparison the increase reached 104.3%, which places Argentina among the countries with the highest increase in the cost of living in the world.
CGT support
In the midst of the exchange crisis, the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) came out to support the Government and, in tune with the Casa Rosada, targeted the “speculators.” Through a Twitter thread, Héctor Dáer, one of the general secretaries of the CGT, shared images of an act that took place in the central building together with the Minister of Labor, Raquel “Kelly” Olmos, and her partner of Culture, Tristán Bauer.
During the event, which took place in the Felipe Vallese Hall of the historic union building, Daer conveyed to the ministers its support for Alberto Fernández, Sergio Massa and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and the message that the “CGT is going to defend the rights of the Argentines”.
“The CGT is part of this National and Popular Government and responsible for leading the labor movement. We are not going to allow speculators to bombard them every day with operations and speeches that always harm them: the workers”, launched the leader. Lastly, the trade unionist also added that: “In the baseboards of the TV channels there remain values of a market that does not exist, but that destabilizes the economy of the households. The CGT is going to be where it has to be to defend the Argentine people”.
