The government is hunting for the itinerant dollar: how much money that today goes to the blues could enter that way

Government is developing more creative ways to hold back the dollars that filter through the holes of the parallel economy 130 gap% between the official price and the alternatives, from blue to MEP and cash with liqui.

No tourist who has investigated Argentina a bit before landing in Ezeiza will exchange his bank accounts for the official $ 128 dollar in exchange for the buyer when the saplings pay him $ 295 this Wednesday ($ 301 for the seller) .

For this reason, this Wednesday the Minister of Tourism Matías Lammens announced that a “differentiated exchange rate” will be applied for tourists. “Anyone who can settle their dollars in the formal market, through a credit card or any other formal means, can access a differentiated exchange rate which is closer to the dollar than it has to do with the MEP dollar (the dollar you get by buying and selling bonds) or by liquidation (CCL), “he said.

How many dollars is the government trying to capture in this way? According to official tourism data, from January 1 to today, tourists have brought 1.4 billion dollars to the country. But of that amount only 16% ($ 160 million) has changed in the official market. The rest, 1,240 million, went to the blue.

When travelers trade their dollars in the informal market, those bills do not enter the reserves of the Central Bank, but they remain in the private circuit. That is why the government wants to catch them, through some kind of incentive that is not yet clear.

It is also unclear cHow to recycle first, for example, soybean producers, that a tourist can get $ 290 for every dollar, when they only get $ 129 (wholesale), plus the discount at the source.

Lammens was honest and admitted that “it is clear that what the exchange rate gap does is that the tourist who arrives, especially from neighboring countries, go to the informal market change”.

“We must strengthen the reserves of the Central Bank. Tourism is one of the main generators of foreign currency for Argentina”, he assured.

This Thursday, Economy Minister Silvina Batakis will conduct a meeting with the economic cabinet, in which “various measures will be analyzed” that could be communicated “by the end of this week or next week”.

Meanwhile, expectations continue to do their best, with a gap that does not stop growing and in an economy in which traders take the most expensive dollar in the market as a reference (as seen in the windows).