Martín Guzmán met with a White House official before traveling to the Paris Club

Economy Minister Martín Guzmán met the United States Ambassador to Argentina, Marc Stanley, and the Deputy Undersecretary of State at noon this Wednesday. Marco Wellsfor analyze energy investment projects and review the latest progress in debt talks ahead of the Argentine official’s trip to France next week to close a deal with the Parisian club.

During the meeting at the Palacio de Hacienda, Guzmán reviewed the economic and financial landscape with representatives of the White House, satisfied with the approval of the first audit carried out by the IMF, which allowed the entry this Tuesday of a second outlay of $ 4,000 millionamid the tensions over currency restrictions that have generated concern among investors.

Following his visit, Wells met with the Secretary for Strategic Affairs, Gustavo Béliz, to discuss strengthening bilateral relations and Alberto Fernández’s upcoming visit to the White House at the end of July.

Béliz and Guzmán negotiate the arrival of new funds from multilateral organizations for more than 700 million dollars in July. The minister met with World Bank officials on Tuesday to discuss loans and investment projects.

The visit by Stanley and Wells, a State Department official traveling to the region after the Summit of the Americas, was read in Economics as a wink.

“Deputy Undersecretary of State Wells held a productive meeting with Minister Martín Guzmán to discuss joint employment opportunities on economic development,” they said on Twitter from the US embassy in Argentina.

Despite pressure from Cristina Kirchner and Sergio Massa to step aside, the head of the economy is still negotiating at the moment the easing of the second quarter targets with the Fund in the face of difficulties in accumulating reserves, reducing the fiscal deficit and support the financial program.

On Wednesday evening, at a press conference at the Casa Rosada, Guzmán once again ratified the economic direction and denied that he intended to resign.

“Today Argentina needs to reduce its primary fiscal deficit and a DNU has been issued that updates the national public sector balance sheet to give macroeconomic policy a more coherent character,” he said. in his last staff reportthe agency once again called for a dollar acceleration, a rate hike and a reduction in spending, along with a rate hike to meet annual targets.

In this context, on Wednesday the minister held a virtual meeting with the authorities of the Paris Club, in which they agreed on a meeting next Wednesday in the French capital.

This meeting was the reason, as explained in Economics, of his missing to the Council of Ministers, where his peers awaited clarification on the financial tensions unleashed by the restrictions on imports.

The goal of the economy is to close in July an agreement to restructure the debt with the Paris Club, restructured by the then Minister of Economy Axel Kicillof in 2014, and obtain a reduction in interest rates. In May it was agreed to defer the payment of a debt of at least $ 2,000 million to September 30, 2024, while maintaining the previous criterion of reaching an agreement by June 30, that is, this Thursday.

Last year, out of a $ 2.4 billion debt, a total of $ 430 million was paid to the consortium of countries as capital, due to the negotiation. But the government has not confirmed whether the transaction reduced the remaining balance.

“The payments are in account of the future negotiation, then we will see the precise impact on capital and interest, it is part of the negotiation”, say official sources.

The payments were triggered because Argentina has undertaken to make payments proportional to those made to other bilateral creditors, as in the case of China.

The country in turn pays a 9% penalty for extending the validity of the agreement in 2014 beyond 2019, for which what Guzmán is looking for is reduce this penalty and get a substantially lower rate.