Annabella quiroga
11/10/2020 12:00
Clarín.com
Economy
Updated 11/10/2020 12:28
Since October 24, the price of the blue dollar has been deflating.
Just as three weeks ago it seemed that it had no ceiling and was heading unstoppably towards $ 200, now it seems to have no floor and crosses
another psychological barrier,
that of $ 150. This Tuesday it dropped two pesos at the opening and
is sold at $ 149 .
Is there any
chance that you
park further down?
For the analysts consulted by Clarín, there
is little room for the decline to deepen.
Thus, the floor appears to be close to the $ 150 area.
Even though it is an informal market, blue adheres to certain rules.
One of them is to
maintain a distance in accordance with the cash with liqui (CCL),
the operation used to withdraw foreign currency from the country.
That gap is fading: this Tuesday, the blue and the CCL are trading at the same price, $ 149.
Both the cash with liquid and the MEP dollar, the transaction that allows acquiring foreign currency through the Buenos Aires stock market, have been experiencing their own withdrawal.
The CCL touched $ 181 in the third week of October, while the MEP reached $ 163. Since then they have been falling, pushed by the Government that on the one hand gave signs of some monetary and fiscal austerity, and on the other it came out to offer attractive instruments for investors who want to exit the Argentine peso market.
But the decisive impact is that official bodies such as
the Central Bank and ANSeS go out daily to settle bonds such as AL30
, which is used to operate with the CCL, to expand the offer and force prices to fall.
In the last two weeks, parallel dollars fell 20%.
Matías Rajnerman, from the Ecolatina consultancy, details that the decline responds to two major factors.
"On the one hand, in October,
the Government changed its strategy: it
stopped punishing and restricting demand (as it did with the tightening of the stocks) to start encouraging supply (with a higher rate for bank transfers and fewer withholdings ).
The measures were late and were weak, but it
helped. "
But he warns that for the retraction of the blue to be sustainable, savers must find incentives to switch to pesos.
"The fixed-term interest rate remains at 34% in a context of inflationary acceleration, so that the opportunity cost of dollarizing, the premium for saving in pesos, did not improve. On this side,
there is little margin for an additional decline
".
The macro ordering also begins to carve.
"If there are not some fundamental changes (especially related to the fiscal, which is what the market demands), the calm could be reversed in the coming weeks and
give way to a new acceleration
", says Rajnerman.
"There is not much room for the blue dollar to continue falling,"
says Juan Pablo Di Iorio, from the ACM consultancy.
"On the one hand, the price of the solidarity dollar, at $ 140
, imposes a moving floor on the exchange gap,
so the price of parallel dollars would find a limitation there."
Di Iorio points out that "on the other hand, the increase in the fiscal deficit that occurs seasonally in December - which would be financed with a transfer of profits by the Central Bank - would imply
a new pressure factor
.
"
Yesterday the Government exchanged peso securities for another two dollar bonds for US $ 750 million, with the aim of giving way to foreign investment funds that had been trapped in Argentina.
"Although this placement takes pressure off the parallel dollar market, at the same time it
increases the bond rate
, which has an impact on the price of the CCL and the MEP," says Di Iorio.
"This would generate an even higher cost of intervention and lower the firepower of the BCRA and ANSES, which would limit the intervention capacity and impact on fiscal sustainability," says the ACM economist.
Gabriel Caamano, from the consulting firm Ledesma, indicates that "as long as the CCL / MEP is kept low,
the blue dollar may fall somewhat more
. But for now the CCL / MEP is maintained at these levels based on intervention, which is not the case with the blue. Ergo, it doesn't have to stick. "
For Caamaño, "the logical thing would be for the blue to be one notch higher. It does not seem that the CCL / MEP is going to go any lower."
But he remarks that to maintain this
exchange rate summer it
is necessary to have more solid foundations.
"It would also be good if the economic policy changes are deepened so that
the decompression of the gap is more genuine
. Likewise, with the retail dollar charged by the PAIS tax and the retention of 35% of Profits, the gap tends to have a high floor ".
AQ
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