10/23/2020 10:05 PM
Clarín.com
Opinion
Updated 10/24/2020 8:35 AM
Martín Guzmán's plan for this Friday was to
accompany Alberto Fernández to Misiones.
Have the opportunity to speak calmly with the President about his plans to stabilize the financial situation.
Climb 10,000 meters on the plane and clear your head a bit from the Argentine hell.
It could not be.
The Minister of Economy had to stay in Buenos Aires to show
signs of calm.
In the morning he answered questions on the radio with journalists Ernesto Tenembaum and Reynaldo Sietecase.
And in the evening he did it on television with Alejandro Fantino.
Two different audiences.
And the same goal.
Clear the doubts
that invade millions of Argentines.
To what value is the dollar going to rise?
Is there any way out for the country in this labyrinth that occurs every ten years?
How long will you remain in government?
Guzmán clings
to the same mantra
these days
.
In public, in front of the press, to the businessmen who consult him in passing during economic events, he replies that he is not going to devalue.
That his plans do not include bringing the official dollar to ninety, one hundred or one hundred and ten pesos.
"The devaluation has no logic if there is a trade surplus and there is almost no debt to pay," he
insists.
On Friday he said that little prayer on the radio and
the market answered him with their pocket.
A while later, the blue dollar jumped from 190 to 195 pesos.
Guzmán's mantra also risks that
the blue dollar has no impact on real life.
This is how he put it crudely a week ago at the IDEA Colloquium.
Therefore, businessmen chatted frantically on their cell phones.
The alarm grew because there have already been many ministers who
have played that same card and have lost the game.
Argentines now go to pharmacies, hardware stores and car dealerships and no one wants to sell them medicine, no light bulbs or zero kilometers until the blue dollar goes down.
Perhaps it happens that
the real life of all of them does not resemble that of the minister.
For this reason, Guzmán's mantra is completed in private meetings.
With the President, with other ministers or with legislators from the Frente de Todos.
"I'm not going to resign," he repeats to all of them.
Especially those who have doubts.
Alberto Fernández, as Marcelo Bonelli pointed out in this newspaper, has given him
until the first days of November,
when the result of the bond issue is seen with which he wants to convince a couple of investment funds that move about seven billion of dollars.
You may not have that much time.
Guzmán swears that the stock dollar and the cash with liquidation
have
already
begun to yield.
That the reduction to three days of the time that the funds are withheld from investors will ensure that the market stabilizes and the dollars begin to return to the Central Bank instead of leaving.
In the Government there are
some who believe him and others who do not.
Those who don't believe him, whisper to the President.
"Let Martín devalue so whoever replaces him has the clearest path."
Cabinet intrigues when
the Winter Palace trembles.
Ten days ago, the President gave Guzmán total management of the foreign exchange strategy.
"I have all the power"
, the Minister of Economy has been emboldened ever since.
That is why it does and undoes as the dollar
approaches the psychological barrier of 200 pesos.
Power, it is known, is
an aphrodisiac and treacherous tool.
Guzmán will be the architect of the victory if things go well for him and
the absolute owner of the defeat
if the dollar, as so many times in Argentina, beats another bureaucrat to destroy that exquisite and perfected mantra in Columbia.
