Although the Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa, insists, after the bad data at the start of the year, that an inflation target of 60% for this 2023 is "achievable", in the market they see too many factors that put pressure on prices
and
coincide that it will be difficult for the Government to reach December with inflation below 90%.
"No bad result in a game is going to get me out of the fight in the championship to lower inflation
," Massa remarked this weekend in an interview on CNN.
However, consultants and market analysts are not optimistic: they believe that there are pending regulated price increases that will put pressure on the entire official INDEC measurement and alert that the two "anchors"
used by this government, the exchange rate and that of the tariffs, will no longer have the desired effect.
"The difficulty with promising inflation of 60% per year is that it
generates inconsistent behavior, there is no credible guideline
and the result may be worse than what would exist in a scenario where the guideline was more realistic," warned Guido Lorenzo, from the LCG consultancy. .
The diagnosis seems accurate: the CPI for January failed to register a good part of the increases expected for this year.
Among them is
the price of meat, which has risen up to 30% since the second half of January for some cuts.
"A significant share of the February price increase will be explained by this concept," remarked a report by the consultancy GMA Capital.
Within the CPI, the category of Food and Non-Alcoholic Beverages has a participation of 25% and within this category,
meat is the basket item that weighs the most, with an incidence of 9%
.
Although the Government came out in the last week with a package of measures to deal with increases in beef cuts, economists believe that the results of these initiatives will be meager.
"Given the volume of habitual consumption in the country, the consumption pattern of the population and the degree of informality of the main point of sale of meat (with a lower proportion of electronic means of payment), the measures hardly generate an
impact relevant
to mitigate the significant increase in bovine meat prices that has been registered in recent weeks," they said in Ecolatina.
But this will not be the only obstacle that the Government must solve.
The increases in regulated prices this month will push the index up: among them we can count 14% for gas and electricity rates, 8% for prepaid, 4% for fuels and 10% for the telecommunications sector.
All this in an electoral context, where
the monetary issue will remain high
and the possibilities of a tightening of the Central Bank's monetary policy seem limited.
Added to this is the depression in the demand for money.
"The opportunity cost of owning liquid money is increasing in the face of inflation that does not seem to show signs of slowing down," they explained in GMA Capital.
"Taking the last 20 years as a reference, today the demand for money is close to 14% below said average.
Any expansionary shock that ends with more pesos in the economy will have a much faster impact on the price level
" , they pointed.
Even the exchange rate front can put even more pressure on prices.
Although in an election year the classic bet of governments is to "step on" the official exchange rate, the increase in prices limits this strategy.
The general panorama only shows challenges: the Central's net reserves once again reached minimum levels, the combo "soybean dollar 2" and drought brought foreign currency income from agriculture to a minimum and savers have already begun to dollarize their portfolios
.
"The striking thing (although this adjective is nothing more than a formalism since, in reality, it does not attract our attention) is that
Massa doubles the bet with an additional dose of the same measures that brought him on this short trip until February.
The The creativity that the government itself boasts of could delay an unwanted photo, but not prevent it," said José Echagüe, from Consultatio.
AQ
look too
Supermarkets: sales fall 7.3% in January and the gap with supermarkets deepens
Ricardo Delgado: "The Argentine economy is already in a high inflation regime"