Daniel Fernández Canedo
06/06/2020 - 12:48
- Clarín.com
- Economy
- Economy
The dollar-blue dollar relationship is once again the order of the day as a result of the tightening of the exchange clamp that the President of the Central Bank, Miguel Pesce, ordered.
With the decision to limit dollars at the official price to companies that must import and have reserves abroad, to those who have received help from the Government to pay part of their salaries and to those who have recently carried out operations with dollars "with liquidation" A foreign exchange "super-stocks" was generated rarely seen.
In the corridors of the Central they comment that the President is now convinced to "have the gavel in his hand" to distribute the deck of dollars, with which, if he wishes, they can half-open or squint the tap of the official dollar outlet to your pleasure.
The super-stocks of Pesce have an important change compared to that of the DJAI (Early Sworn Declaration of Import) of the time of Guillermo Moreno as Secretary of Commerce.
That system stated that dollars were available once the DJAI was approved. The current one allows imports, but it tells entrepreneurs to pay with the dollars they have in reserve. And later, if they want more, they must stand in line for the Central to approve the payments.
Thus, the entrepreneur faces a double uncertainty: whether and at what prices the dollars will be imported.
On the other side of the counter, the reasons are obvious. The Central Bank is running out of dollars and needs to put pressure on exporters to liquidate and close the import tap. And all in the context of keeping the sale of US $ 200 per month to small savers.
Pesce has already publicly pressured Minister Guzmán to speed up the closing of the agreement with the bondholders on the understanding that uncertainty on this issue is one of the reasons for the currency instability. Will the distance between the official dollar and the blue yield in the event of a debt agreement?
Market operators see this as possible, in part, because in order to find a 73% exchange gap such as the one at the end of the week (wholesale at $ 71.17 and parallel at $ 123), one must go back to the months after the Falklands War. In 1982.
The Central Bank's liquid reserves are around US $ 8,000 million , a level that could be considered acceptable for quiet times, but which comes under stress in others such as the current ones.
It was for this reason that Pesce decided to sit on the reserves because he could not know the moment when the debt agreement would be defined, nor did he allow the phantom of a devaluation to grow.
The Central is convinced that with the application of the "super-stocks" and the transcendence that it will maintain the crawling peg (periodic update of the official exchange rate. The official is increasing 2.7% per month), manages to consolidate the idea of that the Government is not going to apply a jump of the dollar.
In fact, for many importers, the exchange rate jump has already taken place on the understanding that they will have to pay part of their purchases abroad at the "cash amount" of $ 114.70, well above the official one.
As the computation of imports in the final products entered a risk, so did part of the pricing scheme that now has the particularity that one of the key players in setting values is the Central Bank.
The prices of the main foods in the basic basket (rice, flour, oil, meat, etc.) are determined by the dollar as they are exportable products. Thus, if we observe the result of the April cost of living index (the last one released), it can be seen that the food grows above the rest, which, in turn, was either frozen by official policy or by quarantine.
The "short blanket" effect dominates dollar policy again even though analysts do not see the officer lagging behind and believe that the $ 123 parallel marks a long unsustainable peak of uncertainty.
On the eve of a possible agreement to reschedule debt of US $ 66,000 million , the economy is preparing to run a curtain that would imply a step forward and that would allow us to start thinking about leaving behind a decade of palpable and painful stagnation.
LGP
