After two weeks of turbulence in April, the foreign exchange market seems to have
"normalized"
at the start of May.
Although still with some volatility, the blue dollar closed on Friday at the same value that it had reached at the end of last month,
$469,
and the financial dollars recovered a, still relative, stability.
But the
fragility of the reserves
and the uncertainty about the ability of the Central to recover the dollars lost so far this year, put a brake on the play of Sergio Massa, who appealed to "
all resources"
to prevent the dollar from continue shooting, in the midst of a spiraling of prices and an increasingly growing political tension, in the run-up to the electoral race.
The Central Bank
sold US$274 million
to pay importers at the beginning of the month.
It also intervened in the bond market, so it parted with greenbacks to buy government securities.
In addition, he faced payments to the Fund for US$ 800 million, in recent days
.
For this reason, the organism once again saw a sharp drop in its level of gross reserves, which on Friday closed just above US$ 34,000 million.
This level,
the lowest in more than six years,
makes the market look at the amount of net reserves, which different consultancies estimate negative at least US$1 billion.
"The situation in terms of reserves continues to be extremely worrying, and none of the macro
fundamentals
guarantee that the -relative- stability will persist over time," said the consulting firm Invecq in its latest report.
The economist Fernando Marull estimates that the net reserves of the Central Bank are around
US$788 million
, but if they are measured using the Fund's methodology, the net reserves would reach US$1,780 million.
How is it that the organization headed by Miguel Pesce sells then at a rate of US$ 100 million per day?
"This can mean different alternatives:
it is using bank reserve requirements, the Sedesa pass, it is taking debt with gold
as collateral or debt with Yuan as collateral," said Marull, who pointed out that it is "a very worrying dynamic." and that facing the STEP the Government could
appeal to more stocks or a fourth round of the "soybean dollar".
"The exchange imbalance will probably continue in the coming months with a loss of gross reserves between May and July of more than US$ 2.2 billion if external financing does not increase. This weakness in the reserve position complicates the stability of the exchange rate gap in the preview of the PASO", they pointed out in Delphos.
While Massa works "at three ends" to try to get fresh dollars to alleviate the situation, in the market they believe that if the Central Bank fails to curb the demand for dollars, that international contribution will be meager
.
All in all, and with an eye on the very short term, the strategy deployed in the last 10 days served to push back the exchange rate gap, which stands at around 107%.
Economists agree that, with this lack of dollars, it will be difficult to bring it down to the level of between 70% and 80% that would be "stability."
"Keeping the exchange rate gap contained is an essential part of the "Massa plan" and a transversal challenge to the "Dollar Front", the "Peso Front" and the "Price Front": currently, a jump in dollars parallels, inflation is more easily filtered (we will probably see some impact in the April and May numbers) and increases devaluation expectations, further reducing the net supply of foreign currency," they said in Ecolatina.
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