The blue dollar carries one month on the rise. In the second half of December, the informal exchange rate “awoke”, after lagging behind the rest of the free quotes. Far from what the Government had anticipated in the last few days of the year, in the first fortnight of January it did not fall, but rather rose by 7% and close to reaching the “Qatar dollar” ceiling, the special price for Argentine tourists, which closed above $377 on Friday.
This Monday the local market will move without external reference, because the US stock markets they won’t work for a vacation in that country. This could serve as an encouragement to a heated currency market, although City analysts expect more tense days.
After weeks of official intervention stretching financial dollar prices at the close, both the MEP dollar and the cash dollar closed higher on Friday. Market participants pointed out that there were some in the final hour of Friday’s session “a major intervention by state agencies to prevent a further rise in free dollars”.
Even so, the equity dollar ended up at $340 and the CCL was near $350. prices will start to “normalise”, analysts say.
Is that blue, which closed at $369 on Friday, remains as the most expensive free quote in the local square and financial dollars run after it. This dynamic is unusual: generally the price of the road ticket is somewhere between the CCL and the equity dollar.
A combination of factors explains this dynamic in the parallel market. On the one hand, the situation of tourism sector, against the incorporation of new differential prices. The MEP dollar for foreign tourists would have absorbed part of the demand for banknotes introduced into the informal market, which partly explains the rise in the blue and, on the other hand, the greater supply of dollars on the stock exchange.
On the other hand, the difference, although increasingly smaller, between the price of blue dollar and qatar In the midst of the summer season, many Argentine tourists have turned to informal commerce to meet their overseas expenses. There is a third factor: the importer bolt hardening, which flips many sectors of the economy to become dollarized, more expensive, in the parallel segment.
The economist Gustavo Ber explained: “After the reorganization of the free dollar, it was the turn of the financial dollars – with greater dynamism in the case of the MEP – given that the widening of the “spread” with respect to this reference was already very large and therefore he anticipated a convergence in view of backwardness, the next scale of which would be the tourist dollar that accompanied the nominality of the economy.
Juan Manuel Franco, economist at SBS Group, said: “The BCRA has chosen to hold rates while continuing to slow the pace of peg crawling, which could ultimately be counterproductive in an environment where harvest estimates falling hard because of the drought”.
“We believe this potential for lower dollar inflows, coupled with the multiple sources of peso expansion we expect in 2023, could put pressure on the CCL and the exchange rate gap going forward,” Franco said.
The tension on foreign exchange contrasts with the good mood reflected on the prices of Argentine stocks and bonds. Though they ended up in the red on Friday, in what many explained as profit taking after several weeks of gains, dollar-denominated stocks are up nearly 17% since the beginning of the month. Meanwhile, the Buenos Aires Stock Exchange accumulates new highs wheel after wheel: measured in dollars until Friday, the S&P Merval index gained more than 18%,
Source: Clarin
