Just one week after the last time, the Central Bank would announce today a new rise in interest rates, as a measure to try to calm the blue dollar and financial institutions.
In the traditional meeting on Thursdays, the Board of Directors of the monetary authority will evaluate this possibility and, according to reports, the increase would be from 81% to 91%, looking for fixed terms to become a profitable instrument again and thus decompress the tension that is coming. trailing the US currency.
If it finally happens, the effective annual rate would go to 130%, more in line with the performance of Lede, which is 135%.
Another element to take into account is that the financial dollars, both Cash with Settlement and the stock dollar or MEP, were below the blue, which fuels the possibility of making a “purée”, which implies buying dollars in the legal market and then sell it informally.
Sources from the city of Buenos Aires indicated that a possibility is also that the blue dollar could go back to $450, for which, if necessary, it is said that injecting 6 million dollars per day.
“Assault” on reserves
On the other hand, a team of economists from the official Frente de Todos (FdT), coordinated by the former Secretary of Internal Commerce, Roberto Feletti, today called for the strengthening of the State’s capacity to “regulate the supply of foreign currency” in the face of the permanent assault that made by the most powerful economic agents against the reserves of the BCRA (Central Bank), which in their opinion “destabilizes governments and endangers the democratic system”.
The economists criticized the previous government for having exhausted “the State’s debt capacity with the international financial market” and also, without mentioning him, the former Minister of Economy, Martín Guzmán, for his “failed restructuring of the public debt” and for having left to the current economic team “a weak Central Bank in terms of accumulation of international reserves”.
Within this framework, they pointed out in their report that “the difficulties encountered by the Argentine economy to reach a situation of relative full employment are found in a production model that prioritizes the export component over domestic consumption, and in the absence of integration of national production of the goods that the economy can offer to that internal market”.
The document coordinated by Feletti had the participation of the former Undersecretary of Policies for the Internal Market of the Ministry of Domestic Trade, Antonio Mezmezian; the former national director of Economic Programming of the Ministry of Economy, Horacio Rovelli; Erica Pinto, Fabiola Vela Velázquez, Diego Perrella, Diego Rozengardt, Graciela Tilca and Delfina Salerno.
“Strengthening the State in its ability to regulate the supply of foreign currency and its application is decisive to keep the economy stable,” they assured, adding that “the permanent assault carried out by the most powerful economic agents against the BCRA reserves is the one that destabilizes governments and endangers the democratic system”. Likewise, they pointed out that “the current economic team, which took office in the middle of last year, found itself with a weak Central Bank in terms of the accumulation of international reserves and a singular depletion of the sources of currency supply to undertake the recomposition of the level of Bookings”.
In a review of the previous administration, they remarked that “during the Macri government, the State’s borrowing capacity with the international financial market was exhausted and then continued with the excessive loan contracted with the IMF, liquidating in the course of a management the sources of private and multilateral financial funds”. “Later, during the Government of the Front of All, the 2020-2022 biennium had large surpluses in the trade balance that did not favor a significant accumulation of reserves either,” they indicated, in a criticism of what they considered “the absence of a precise administration of the external sector during the Government of the FdT”.
This failure, they asserted, “allowed a drain of foreign currency for payment of debts of private companies abroad for US$ 5,700 million and the excess of imports with access to the official exchange market, which resulted in a strong accumulation of stocks of the large companies, a figure that in 2022 reached its maximum estimate of US$ 11.3 billion”. “This explains the weakness of the Argentine external sector despite having produced a strong deleveraging of its public sector abroad in the 2005-2015 decade, and having powerful surpluses in its trade balance in the 2020-2021 biennium,” they completed. .
Economists criticized the private sector for “the indiscriminate appropriation of the foreign exchange supply that it carried out” between 2016 and 2022, which “made any stabilization policy unsustainable, because it systematically placed the economy on the brink of an external crisis.” On the other hand, they stated that “the debt restructuring carried out in 2020 did not produce the expected results in terms of a reduction in country risk and the consequent positive flow of financial currencies” and that, in addition to this “failed restructuring”, the agreement with the IMF “did not clear up questions about the external solvency of the Argentine economy.”
