While at the National Congress discuss the fate of the FGS (Sustainability Guarantee Fund), the head of ANSeS, Osvaldo Giordano, reported that the Fund increased from $27,707 million to $32,658 million between December 2022 and November 2023, up by 17.9% (+4,951 million), during the previous management.
Of that total, the 68% were invested in domestic stocks and 17.4% in stocks. Shares held by FGS went from $3,646 million to 5,678 million dollars, with an increase of 55.7%. In production or infrastructure projects, investment was $1,572 million (4.8% of the total value of the FGS), 30.8% higher than the $1,202 million in November 2022.
The government’s megaproject proposes to transfer the FGS – which some call “pensioners’ money” and others “grandmother’s jewels” – to National Treasure, cancel public bonds – because they are an inter-public debt – and use the remainder to pay the foreign debt and/or as collateral to contract new debt.
In Congress, some nongovernmental blocs say that if FGS is liquidated, the proceeds will go it should be used to pay sentences firm judgments on pensioners and ANSeS’s debts with provincial pension funds.
Through a report, Giordano recalls that at the end of last November they had 1,100,997 beneficiaries of the pension system received loans from FGS and another 114,445 non-beneficiaries of the system, such as taxpayer workers. The total stock of these loans amounted to 1,215,442 million dollars, equivalent to 1,453 million dollars (4.4% of the total value of the FGS). From this it follows that the the conversion was made at $836 per dollar, the value at that time of financial dollars.
In measurements prior to the current management, the calculation of the Fund’s value in dollars took into account the official exchange rate, which increased the final result. For example, its value was $60,715 million in the second quarter of 2023. The reduction in the Fund’s dollar value is explained by the dollar price used to convert assets into FGS pesos.
The ANSeS explains that previously “data had been published in the quarterly reports according to which, given the particular situation of the country’s economy and with the intensification of the exchange rate, the official dollar has lost representativeness and prevented it from showing really the real value of the fund, since sometimes there was a difference of over 200% of the amount compared to other contributions”. And that “during the previous management (2019-2023) it was decided to report the value of the fund investment taking as reference the price of the dollar at the official exchange rate of the purchasing rate of the Banco de la Nación Argentina”.
Therefore, “with the aim of guaranteeing greater transparency and facilitating access to public information for all citizens, from January ANSES communicates the evaluation of the assets of the Sustainability Guarantee Fund (FGS) of monthly way and with a new evaluation methodology governed by technical market values, which guarantees greater transparency.”
Giordano clarified that “the asset evaluation criteria and methodologies are defined by the FGS Executive Committee, as is the change in the methodology”.
Source: Clarin
