Gustavo Bazzan
09/15/2020 - 22:43
Clarín.com
Economy
Once the pandemic was declared, the National Government's strategy to face the COVID crisis and avoid the collapse of the health system focused on establishing a quarantine to
“flatten the curve”,
that is, trying to reduce the number of people who were infected at the same time. time, and thus ensure that those who fell ill could be adequately treated in hospitals.
What the Central Bank did last night is similar, especially with regard to companies: it
wants to flatten the demand curve for dollars
, and for this it requires firms with hard currency debt to
reprofile their maturities
, in the same way that the State did the same with its debt in dollars.
Those who do not enter that plan, must get the dollars by another way,
at a higher price.
At the same time, it facilitates the sale of dollars through the stock market so that it is easier to
sell blank currencies at a higher price than the official one
, thus seeking to increase the supply of currencies and decompress the price in the alternative but legal market.
The announcements are the other side of an economic program that fails to generate confidence even after having closed a debt swap for more than 100,000 million dollars with 99% adherence.
Neither the exchange rate calmed down nor was there a recomposition of monetary reserves.
The exchange rate gap was an
irresistible magnet
for those who saw buying 200 dollars a month as a round-the-clock business: saving foreign exchange at an affordable price or extra income close to 30% if the mash was made of buying in the official and selling in the blue .
Almost 1 billion dollars went that way in August.
Now it is intended to
erase the gap with the advance of 35% on account of Profits or Personal Assets
.
It will work, perhaps, as long as the blue dollar does not detach from the
Dollar-COUNTRY-Earnings
, which now has a floor price around $ 130/132 against a blue that yesterday closed, coincidentally, at $ 132.
If the traps do not work, it is because you know how they start and above all you know how they end.
In that sense, the only uncertainty is when they end.
The Government says that the dollar problem will be solved the day that Argentina manages to export 100 billion dollars.
It is unimaginable today how to achieve that goal, with more and more regulations designed to hinder access to the dollar.
After six months of quarantine, it is clear that the Government's strategy for Covid failed.