Argentina admitted that it did not meet its reserve target for the second quarter by a narrow margin, but said he redoubled his efforts to reach them in September; asked a give up the soy dollar is required lower reserve accumulation target which it had pledged to meet from $ 5.8 billion to $ 5 billion this year.

Clarin had already anticipated it on September 20.

The IMF report on the performance of the Argentine economy, released last night, has some hard paragraphs.

“Most of the quantitative objectives of the program were achieved at the end of June, with the exception of the floor of net international reserves, which was not achieved due to higher than expected growth in import volume“.

Read, for the IMF the economy is overheated and import demand prevents the build-up of reserves as predicted in the original roadmap. To accumulate more reserves, the IMF asked to lower the level of imports. According to a calculation by the consulting firm Equilibra, the recession that would be necessary to reach the end-of-year target would cause GDP to sink by almost 4%. The government is unwilling to pay that cost.

Perhaps this is why Sergio Massa has already asked the IMF to change the target of accumulated reserves in 2022: instead of 5.8 billion dollars, it would be 5.0 billion dollars.

Another paragraph of the report concerned the question of prices.

“Inflation was substantially higher than expected and political setbacks and uncertainty have led to a period of market stress, which in turn has contributed to the maintenance of the performance criteria related to foreign exchange restrictions and multiple exchange practices not followed. “

The IMF already sees 100% inflation for this year, in line with the REM record that the BCRA released Thursday (would reach 100.3%). And it is also said that the resource used by Massa to increase reserves (l soybean dollar) violated the statute of the organization (article VIII). The IMF itself watches over international best practices in terms of exchange rates and was created so that countries avoid the depreciation of their currencies in order to obtain rapid profits, which in the pre-war period of 1930 led to a world crisis.

The honeymoon in Massa with the markets is over now you have to show what your roadmap is to reach the goals.