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The dollar in Argentina: six exchange rates to stop the bleeding of the Central Bank

2022-07-25T10:38:36.166Z


Official, blue, solidarity, counted with liqui or Mep are some of the prices that keep Argentines awake in the midst of the debacle of their national currency


People walk in front of an exchange house in Buenos Aires (Argentina). Juan Ignacio Roncoroni (EFE)

"Argentines think green," says an old political maxim.

The green is that of the dollar, and if they think of the US bill it is because they are looking for a refuge for their savings.

All governments, whatever their political orientation, try to tame the dollar in the local market or, what is the same, support the peso, which insists on falling down a slide in more or less constant cycles of about ten years.

The formulas have been varied, but with similar results: failure.

If a person was born in Argentina and is over 50 years old, they will have always lived in an economic crisis.

Good times are just incubators for the next disaster.

And the dollar is there, like a thermometer for the advancing disease.

In order not to go too far back in time, let us think of the ten years of “convertibility”, as the Government of Carlos Menem called the 1:1 parity of the peso with the dollar.

During the 1990s, the national currency maintained its value against the currency and inflation ironed out.

But everything exploded between the end of 2001 and the beginning of 2002, when there were no longer enough dollars to sustain the price.

The dollar went from one to three pesos in a few months.

With Kirchnerism there were also years of prosperity, but the deficit and indebtedness fueled inflation and the peso gradually lost its value.

Towards the end of Cristina Kirchner's second term, the outflow of dollars was persistent and a stock market was applied.

With the restrictions, the black currency market returned, a classic started in the seventies.

The parallel quote was called

blue,

without anyone clarifying very well why, and it was set according to the supply and demand for greenbacks in an informal market, outside the legal circuits.

When Mauricio Macri came to power in 2015, the official dollar, whose value was set by the government, could be bought for 9.84 pesos.

The

blue

, meanwhile, was sold at 14.50 pesos per unit.

The gap, another very Argentine word, between one and the other was considered then, and still today, as evidence of the devaluation tensions that the local currency resisted.

Macri arrived at the Casa Rosada with the promise of turning Argentina into "a normal country."

Under his liberal vision, this meant disarming the exchange rate trap inherited from Kirchner, eliminating all restrictions on the outflow and inflow of foreign currency, and allowing the exchange rate to float freely.

In 2017, halfway through his term, the official dollar and the

blue

were sold at the same value: 19 pesos.

The illusion was short-lived.

In 2018, the markets stopped lending money to Macri, who had to request a financial rescue from the IMF to sustain the bleeding of dollars from the Central Bank, which fueled the flight abroad in a deregulated market.

This is how we arrived at Alberto Fernández.

The Peronist government received an official dollar at 63 pesos and a

blue

at 69.70.

The gap was minimal, but soon everything would be worse, much worse.

The collapse of the peso forced the government to tighten exchange restrictions with new and varied regulations.

The patches applied by the Central Bank to keep its reserves standing have made the foreign exchange market more complex to limits that outside of Argentina could seem like science fiction.

Today, the South American country has six different quotes.

Along with proliferation, traps to evade regulations or simply take advantage of the disaster with complex cross-operations have also multiplied.

To understand the map a little more, we present here a list of the exchange rates that currently apply in Argentina.

official dollar

“He is a unicorn”, defines him without much enthusiasm a source from the financial market who will keep his name confidential.

The official exchange rate is set by the Government and is only used to settle imports or the payment, in small increments, of debts contracted abroad by companies.

This Friday, the official dollar closed at 136 pesos, a value that has lost the race against inflation and is "backward", another classic of the Argentine economy.

If a dollar saver exchanges his bills at a bank window, he will receive these 136 pesos for each one.

If he wants to buy, he won't be able to.

Dolar blue'

It is the currency that is marketed in “caves” through “little trees”, as the characters that swarm through the center of Buenos Aires are called, offering to change currencies, especially to tourists.

The

blue

operates outside the legal circuit, does not pay taxes and is as opaque as an agreement between private parties without State control can be.

"40% of the Argentine economy works in the black, there are many people whose entire economic life is in the black, if they want to buy dollars they have to go to the

blue

, they have no other option," explains the financial market source.

The

blue

price on Friday was 338 pesos, 41% more than at the beginning of June and 160% more than the current official sale price.

All Argentines look at the

blue

.

When it is triggered, alarms of an impending devaluation are activated.

It is the thermometer that measures mistrust in the government's economic policy, which today is at a minimum.

saving dollar

The only way to store foreign currency outside the informal market is through the savings dollar.

The Government limited operations to online banking and to 200 dollars per person.

The savings dollar was quoted last Friday at 224 pesos per unit, product of the official value plus 30% of the so-called Tax for an Inclusive and Solidarity Argentina (COUNTRY) and 35% that is paid on account of income tax.

The difference between the value of the savings dollar and the

blue

dollar has grown to 114 pesos, because two fixed taxes are applied to the former and the latter floats freely.

The savers can then make what is known in the financial market as "mash".

The operation is simple.

“You buy your 200 dollars in the legal market, you sell it to the

blue

on the black market and you make a difference that at times can leave you between 8,000 and 10,000 pesos.

It is an ant business, but if you think that a retiree earns the minimum of 35,000 pesos, more and more people are pushed to make a puree, "explains the source.

Dollar card or solidarity

It is the one paid by those who make consumption abroad with credit cards that, in Argentina, are canceled in pesos.

As the change to pesos was made to the official dollar, Argentines turned to buying all kinds of products online.

The bleeding became unsustainable, until the Central Bank decided to make these operations more expensive.

The dollar card is taxed in the same way as savings, but the income tax advance rate is 45%.

The problem for the Government is that when the

blue

flies, the card dollar becomes tempting again.

This Friday, those who canceled their credit expenses abroad paid one dollar to 238 pesos, with a difference in favor of 100 pesos.

The only tool that the authorities have to stop the outflow of foreign currency by credit card is to add new taxes, a race that is losing day by day.

Dollar MEP and CCL

They are different, but they have the same function: they allow companies to obtain dollars in the legal market to pay off debts.

The price of both is very similar.

On Friday, the Electronic Payment Market or MEP dollar closed at 315 pesos and the Cash with settlement or CCL at 326 pesos.

The first arises from the purchase of bonds in the Buenos Aires stock market with pesos and the sale of the same title in dollars.

The second, to exchange pesos for dollars abroad through the purchase and sale of shares and debt securities.

"The difference with the blue

dollar

is that both are legal operations, blank," says the market source.

Both are part of the so-called financial dollars and increasingly function as the only source for large companies to obtain foreign currency outside of the

blue.

“Now that the

blue

is the most expensive price, it works like a vacuum cleaner so that the financiers continue to rise.

Today it is business to buy the MEP dollar and sell to the

blue

, ”explains the broker, as an example of the movements that arise when the disaster grows.

“Today we have a lot of exchange rates with people trying to take a difference between them, in a messy and unfair system.

In the future you will have to try to make them converge, because as long as there are gaps between one and the other, nothing will be resolved”, he concludes.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-07-25

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