Sunday May 14, 2023 | 11:14 p.m.
The Ministry of Economy decided to implement a series of measures starting next Monday, with the aim of stabilizing exchange rates, increasing the interest rate to make placements in pesos more attractive and accelerating agreements with multilateral organizations, to which They will add initiatives to sustain the level of consumption and the level of activity, sources from the Palacio de Hacienda anticipated this Sunday.
The announcements will be made official this Monday and from the Palacio de Hacienda they maintain that more measures will be announced during the week.
The measures were defined during the afternoon of last Saturday, within the framework of the meeting led by Minister Sergio Massa and in which the Secretary for Economic Policy, Gabriel Rubinstein; the portfolio’s chief adviser, Leonardo Madcur; the legal and administrative secretary, Ricardo Casal; the president of the Central Bank, Miguel Pesce; the head of the Federal Administration of Public Revenues, Carlos Castagneto; the General Director of Customs, Guillermo Michel; and the director of the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses, Marco Lavagna, among others.
With regard to the Central Bank, the decision taken is to increase the rate of fixed terms by 6 percentage points, in order to make placements in pesos more attractive, thus the annual interest rate that 30-day fixed terms would pay they would be around 97% for placements of up to $30 million.
In addition, the meeting ratified the decision that the Central Bank will increase intervention in the foreign exchange market and the administration of the “crawling peg”, a term that refers to the strategy of progressive and controlled devaluation of the currency.
The intervention of the Central will have as its main objective the “stabilization of the exchange rates” and “expand the capacity of intervention in CCL and MEP”, the sources stressed.
Regarding the level of activity, the Federal Administration of Public Revenues will implement a new current debt payment plan of up to 84 installments and a tax relief for the moratorium on Badlar-rate installments, in response to a request made essentially by SME entities.
In addition, it will seek to speed up the approval of requests submitted to the Import System of the Argentine Republic (SIRA) for the importation of capital goods, through the mechanism called 360-day SIRA.
To this will be added the decision to seek an ordering of the price makers and the fiscal situation in the Central Market.
