The blue dollar was up another two pesos this Wednesday and stretched to $383. With this price is tied with the Qatari dollar, the one that applies to expenses abroad exceeding 300 US dollars a month, which until now were the most expensive on the market.
In a market with limited supply and limited demand, informal has started the year with momentum: has already increased by 10.7% and reached the highest nominal price recorded to date.
After the November-December foreign exchange summer, when the alternative dollars hardly budged, the blue woke up and soared at a rate that practically doubled the expected inflation for the month.
The reasons for this leap are linked to the greater demand of tourists traveling abroad and who prefer to bring tickets, while foreigners arriving in Argentina no longer find it so attractive to change their dollars at small trees.
Since mid-December, the Foreigner Dollar has been in effect, allowing visitors to pay with a card and receive a similar price to the MEP Dollar, found in $352.
The leap into the blue is also motivated by the evolution of inflation. After the slowdown in November and December, the record returned to close to 6% in January with no signs of a turning point in the short term.
With blue at $383, the interchange gap with the wholesaler reaches 107%. The government’s goal is to bring this gap below 100%, as happened in December.
For his part, the MEP closed $352down 0.5%, while cash with cash closed at $366, which also marks a nominal record.
Is there room to continue climbing? “The MEP and CCL dollar is expected to be worth over $400 today,” says the economist Salvador Di Stéfano. “The dollar is an asset in this economy and it is clear that to date it has risen less than inflation”.
The prospect of fewer dollars coming in this year due to drought, coupled with an appetite for election-year dollarization, rising inflation, and the chances that government spending will pick up in the middle of the campaign the government is missing out on opportunities to disarm expectations and drop “free” dollars.
“Argentina has a solvency problem and the government is wrong in believing that it has a liquidity problem,” summarizes Di Stéfano.
The Central Bank had to come out again to sell dollars on this wheel. This time he lost $56 million. In the first fortnight of the month, the Centrale accumulated a purchase balance of 285 million dollars. But in the second fortnight the balance was reversed and now that balance exists reduced to $27 million.
Country risk rose by 0.5% to 1834 basis points, while Argentine bonds had a negative turn with declines of around 0.5%. Merval was up 4.3% and accumulates a 28.7% advance for the month.
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Source: Clarin
