The summer of exchange rates seems to have come to an end, thanks to the cash dollar consolidating above 1,000 dollars.
This Thursday rose 3.6% and reached $1,086, implying a jump of 11.7% in the three wheels that will follow one another from 2024. The MEP has also risen, which already reaches the $1,050while the blue was handed over to $1,020.
Thus the currency gap widens once again 3.4% and therefore more than doubled compared to the record recorded less than a month ago, when it was reduced to 15%.
Although the widening gap is marked, It is still a long way from the 210% achieved in October, in the midst of electoral uncertainty and when Javier Milei was still pursuing his dollarization project.
So far this week The process of recovering alternative dollars has acceleratedwhich until a few days ago the market expected only for the second half of January, when the strong demand for pesos typical of the end of the year and the beginning of the holidays would begin to dry up.
Liquid money (CCL) woke up amidst the noise generated by inflation, traveling at 30% monthly while the official dollar recovered at just 2%. And he was not the only one: in addition to the rise of the MEP, which advanced by 5.6% this week, there are starting to be increases in the future dollar. The price for March was rearranged this Thursday at $1,042, a jump of 4.3% on the day.
Despite government promises, official access to the dollar today $811.7 At the wholesale level, it remains limited. And although the Central Bank is rebuilding reserves through purchases in the Single Market and Free Trade (MULC), it is unclear when this link between stocks will be dismantled.
In this wheel. Central has bought 211 million dollars and it’s already accumulating $3,304 million from the December write-down. In this way the net reserves, which had become negative by almost 12,000 million dollars, are now reduced – 8,939 million dollarsaccording to the estimate of Aurum Valores.
The result is that by not being able to access the official dollar, companies’ demand for liquidity grows at a time when supply in this segment begins to contract.
From Portfolio Personal Inversions (PPI) point out that the volume traded in spot dollars in the open electronic market (MAE) – which serves as an indicator of the liquidation of exporters in the MULC – ““has slowed significantly in the first two days of 2024. The downside is that less supply would be channeled to the CCL.”
The current scheme of the Export Enhancement Program requires 80% to be paid into the MULC and 20% into the CCL. Spot trading volume fell to 256 million dollars, the second-lowest amount since the write-down, compared to the average of $338 million in the previous two weeks.
The amount paid into the CCL therefore decreased from the average daily $98 million in the previous two weeks to $64 million.
On the demand side, “investors are incentivized to buy the MEP dollar as long as it is lower than the paper dollar (official +60% tax), which is around $1,300. In other words, there are incentives to arbitrate both quotes, which in turn puts upward pressure on the CCL arbitrating against the MEP”.
Both the MEP and the CCL would have to rise by 25.4% and 24.2% to match the dollar paper, so “they could have an upward path. We understand this, since the exchange rate scheme has been proposed this way since since the beginning of Milei management, the economic team would tolerate a gap doubled to 60%“, PPI mark.
At the same time, the positive expectations that dominated the market in December “could worsen given the obstacles that the government will face in implementing the reforms proposed in the DNU and the Omnibus law, which could lead to a deeper decline in demand for pesos, which is already at historic lows,” says the PPI.
Source: Clarin
