Daniel Fernandez Canedo
09/11/2021 14:03
Clarín.com
Economy
Updated 9/11/2021 2:03 PM
Practically half of the bonds that Minister Martín Guzmán placed to get $ 100,000 million in the week are
tied to the rise in the official dollar
.
Those
dollar-linked bonds
- which cover holders in the event of an exchange rate jump - were an indicator of the markets' expectations regarding what may happen until November 2022.
The purchase of these bonds, plus those tied to inflation, allowed the minister to obtain the necessary pesos to cover the maturities, and the bank operators, to cover their backs in the face of the exchange uncertainty that leads to
the certainty that
the government will have to do something with the dollar in the next six months
.
But can we expect a strong devaluation of the peso between now and the end of the year beyond the result of the
Simultaneous and Compulsory Open Primaries
(PASO) this Sunday?
To risk the future, it would be necessary to refresh the past a bit and remember how the vice president, Cristina Kirchner, thought and acted in exchange matters, in the 2011 presidential election,
when she won with 54% of the votes
;
and in the legislative of 2013, losing to Sergio Massa in the province of Buenos Aires.
A few days after having triumphed, and after having carried out what the economist
Miguel Bein
called the "macrocide", consisting of delaying the dollar by making it rise by 8% and wages by 30%, Cristina Kirchner put the exchange rate cap on to stop a dollarization that had wiped out millions of dollars from the Central Bank's reserves.
Thus he demonstrated that the "we are going for everything" of the beginning of 2012 in the political sphere, had to begin to transit with an
economic restriction
that would deepen over time, and it was the shortage of dollars.
In this context, the now-everyday dollar stocks were born.
Cristina Kirchner won by a wide margin in 2011, it was for everything in 2012, she lost in 2013, and the background that the limit imposed on her was the tight exchange rate that led, at the start of 2014, with
the devaluation
of Juan Carlos Fábrega in the Bank Central and Axel Kicillof at the Ministry of the Economy.
The
jump in the dollar
in January of that year was 23%, and transferred 12 points to annual inflation, although it was accompanied by a consistent rise in the interest rate that was expensive for Kirchnerism.
Cristina Kirchner's common denominator, winning or losing, consisted in
making difficult decisions
in exchange matters to defend one of Kirchner's most precious assets: the Central Bank's reserves.
It is along this path that the expectation of a sudden change in exchange rate policy could vanish as of tomorrow, at least
until after the legislative elections on November 14
.
And what can happen with the free dollars?
That's another history.
And it is very tied, prec
It is specifically, in the
expectation
that it will be generated around the evolution of the precious reserves of the Central Bank.
A recent report from the consultancy
Quantum risks
a behavior and a result of the exchange issue until the end of the year
, focusing on the current level of reserves of the Central.
Quantum highlights
the "unexpected" arrival of dollars in 2021,
which was given by US $ 10,000 / 11,000 million more than the previous year due to the rise in international prices of the products that Argentina exports.
To these currencies were added the approximately
US $ 4,330 million
(in reality they were Special
Drawing
Rights) that the International Monetary Fund contributed and that will allow the Government to cancel debts with that and other international financial organizations.
Among the doubts are which portion of these two contributions may be repeated in 2022 and the evolution of the level of reserves until the end of the year, considering the possibility that the Central may have to intervene with
US $ 21 million a day
to try to control free dollars.
On September 1, the Central's gross reserves reached US $ 46,094 million, while the
"net liquid"
was US $ 1,926 million.
It is clear that there is not much room for the stocks to change, unless greenbacks rain again.
Nor for Cristina Kirchner, a defender of exchange rate stability, even at the cost of the backwardness of the dollar, to modify her decisions on the dollar before the end of the year due to its impact
on inflation
.
LGP