The operation that the Ministry of the Economy launched last week, aimed at saving foreign-denominated dollar securities held by ANSeS, and on the other hand, to go out to sell Argentine-denominated dollar securities, fails to dilute skepticism which has awakened in the local financial market, an attitude which has been reflected in a leap in country risk.
The idea of submitting the feasibility of the exchange operation to the opinion of a group of professionals from the Faculty of Economics of the UBA it didn’t contribute either.
The operators, far from being aware of what the UBA thinks, are more aware of the release of the Bonars which are in the hands of public bodies and which Economy ordered to sell on the market, by some mechanism not yet defined. The date is also not established.
It happens that the newspapers are already trading at predefined pricesand an increase in supply would only further depress these values.
The effect of this announcement was already seen in the last few rounds: bonds have fallen and their rate of return, which moves in the opposite direction, has increased. The shortest bonars, which mature between 2029 and 2030, show a rate of return above 50%. The longest (maturity year 2046), over 26%. The country risk is close to 2,600 pointswhen it was around 1,800 points at the beginning of the year.
The market imagines that if the supply of these cards increases, prices have no other way than to go down. Stocks that today hover around 25 cents fell to 15 cents in July of last year. That is to say, the floor can always be lower.
The economy designed this operation with the idea of obtaining pesos on the market – and not in the Central Bank – to finance its 2023 financial program – the fiscal deficit -. Imagine being able to absorb 2 billion pesos as follows: ANSeS, for example, sells its Bonar and charges it in pesos. With those pesos he goes to the Treasury and hands them over in exchange for another bonus in pesos.
Furthermore, Economy says that Bonar is taking the field, which is in the power of public bodies to give it more liquidity to the legal parallel market of the dollar (MEP or CCL) and avoid a spike in these exchange rates and a widening of the gap.
The problem is that for the Cash with Liquid market – the most used by companies – to work, it is necessary that the person who buys Bonar from Anses against pesos, turn around and find someone who wants to buy those bonds but paying for them with dollar bills paid into an overseas bank account.
Which goes back to the beginning of this whole problem: who will want to put dollars on the table to buy Argentine debt securities to which the market assigns a very high possibility of restructuring.
Experts in the financial sector are wondering if Massa isn’t waiting for the UBA to give him a negative opinion to reverse this operation which has neither rhyme or reason for the market.
Source: Clarin
