The financial climate continued to be red hot on Wednesday. The blue dollar scored a new record, reaching a value of 317 pesos. Financial prices continued to advance, such as the cash with liquidation that closed at 308.75 pesos and an increase in the day of 1.6 percent. The MEP dollar rose 1.9% from Tuesday’s close to 303.44. Sovereign bonds in foreign currency showed parities of 20 percent of their nominal value and some titles in pesos adjusted for inflation showed losses.
The run once morest stock assets and financial exchange rates remains strong for the fourth consecutive week. The bet is to make the official dollar jump. The Central Bank sold another 40 million dollars of reserves, and in coordination with the rest of the economic team, new measures are being prepared to contain the external front, with instruments that would focus on tourism. The objective is to avoid the jump of the wholesale dollar.
The country risk ended at 2794 points. Some foreign currency securities such as the AL35D lost 1.9 percent and cer-indexed bonds such as the tx26 fell 2.7 percent.
This last data keeps the market on alert because the run began precisely once morest these debt instruments in pesos in mid-June, and then spread to the jump of the dollars that are traded on the stock market and the illegal dollar.
In parallel, Argentine bonds in dollars and the shares of local companies listed on the US market resumed this Wednesday the negative sign in the evolution of their prices, contrary to the positive variations that were registered this Wednesday in the main external indices. reference.
The main Argentine declines in that market were in the banking sector, with decreases of 5.3% in Galicia and Macro papers, while the main increases were in Mercado Libre (7.6%) and Edenor (3. 9%).
The performance of Argentine stocks was also negative in the local market. The index S&P Merval ended the day with a drop of 0.2%.
However, the economic team keeps a close eye on these assets and various tools were announced to prevent them from falling in price, which is a problem for Treasury financing. The Central Bank, for example, recently launched a put option so that banks have incentives to acquire Treasury debt in local currency.
Prior to these measures, strategies had also been announced to limit the outflow of dollars for non-strategic imports, access to the exchange market was made more flexible to import to the productive sectors, and a surcharge was implemented for purchases of foreign goods and services with a card. , while financing in pesos for the purchase of tickets outside the country and door-to-door purchases was made impossible. Now they would be working on measures to attract dollars from international tourism.
speculations
The market’s expectations are set on the tone and direction that the measures that the economic cabinet will discuss this Thursday and that might be announced on the same day or during the weekend might acquire. In the reports of the stockbrokers, one of the points of analysis that appears is linked to the question regarding what the economic team will do to reduce the exchange rate gap, which is around 140 percent, one of the highest levels of recent years. It is similar to the one recorded in October 2020.
“The exchange rate gap has skyrocketed and devaluation pressures are growing. Faced with this event, we ask ourselves, what will the government try to do so as not to validate a discreet jump in the exchange rate?”, they indicated in Personal Portfolio.
“There are four tools, which do not guarantee a successful outcome, but will be exhausted before throwing in the towel,” they added. To summarize, according to Portfolio, the following scenarios might be considered:
i) keep adjusting the “cepo” (maintain or increase restrictions on imports, tourism and other services);
ii) sell reservations (It still has a stock of 2.4 billion dollars, which, while meager, is much higher than the negative -666 million at the beginning of March 2022;
iii) sell dollar futures: the estimated short position is 5.5 billion, still lower than the limit set by the IMF of 9 billion;
iv) devalue faster: the crawling peg is already at a rate close to 90 percent. “The problem is that at this rate the exchange rate continues to fall behind (inflation travels to 125 percent) and the Badlar rate to 63 percent (with which there are no incentives to stay in pesos),” he said.
