The blue dollar has been
on the rise for a month
.
In the second half of December, the informal exchange rate
"woke up",
after having lagged behind the rest of the free quotes.
Far from what the Government had anticipated in the last days of the year, in the first fortnight January did not fall, but rather rose 7% and is
close to reaching the ceiling represented by the "Qatar dollar",
the special price for tourists Argentines, which on Friday closed above $377.
This Monday the local market will move without external reference, because the United States stock markets
will not operate due to a holiday in that country.
This could serve as an encouragement to a heated currency market, although analysts in the City expect days of greater tension.
After weeks in which the official intervention "ironed" the prices of financial dollars on the closing, on Friday both the MEP dollar and the cash with liquidity ended with increases.
Market operators pointed out that in the last hour of the conference on Friday there was
"an important intervention by state entities to prevent a new rise in free dollars."
Even so, the stock dollar ended at $340 and the CCL was close to $350.
The rapidity of the rise in spot, which jumped $12 on five wheels, despite intervention in the bond market, may be an indicator that prices will start to "normalise", analysts say.
It is that the blue, which on Friday closed at $369, remains
the most expensive free price in the local
market and the financial dollars are behind it.
This dynamic is not usual: generally the price of the ticket on the street is located in an intermediate step between the CCL and the stock dollar.
A combo of factors explains this dynamic in the parallel market.
On the one hand, the situation of
the tourism sector,
faced with the incorporation of new differential prices.
The MEP dollar for foreign tourists would have absorbed part of the demand for banknotes that entered the informal market, which partly explains the rise in the blue and, on the other hand, the greater supply of dollars on the stock market.
On the other hand, the difference, although increasingly reduced, between the
price of blue and the Qatari dollar
in the height of the summer season, caused many Argentine tourists to turn to informal trading to meet their expenses abroad.
There is a third factor: the
tightening of the import lock,
which leads many sectors of the economy to become dollarized, more expensive, in the parallel segment.
The economist Gustavo Ber explained: "After the rearrangement of the free dollar, it was the turn of the financial dollars - with greater dynamism in the case of the MEP - given that the widening of the "spread" against said reference was already very wide and thus he anticipated a convergence in view of the backwardness, whose next scale would be the tourist dollar accompanying the nominality of the economy.
Juan Manuel Franco, economist at the SBS Group, stated: "The BCRA opted to maintain rates while continuing to slow down the pace of the crawling peg, something that could eventually be counterproductive in a context in which harvest estimates
drop sharply due to the drought".
"We believe this potential for a lower inflow of dollars together with the multiple sources of peso expansion that we foresee for 2023 could put pressure on the CCL and the exchange rate gap going forward," Franco said.
The exchange rate tension contrasts with the good mood reflected in the prices of Argentine stocks and bonds.
Although they ended in the red on Friday, in what many explained as profit taking after several weeks of rises,
dollar titles have risen almost 17% since the beginning of the month
.
Meanwhile, the Buenos Aires stock market accumulates wheel after wheel new maximums: measured in dollars until Friday, the S&P Merval index gained more than 18%,
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