The government continues to close the foreign exchange trap and turn blue into a homeless dollar

The blue dollar is considered to be at $ 338, as it closed on Friday a dollar panic which proves the disorientation of the government in the face of a crisis of confidence that still does not give a glimpse of an effective containment dam.

The latest coin flip responded to the Central Bank’s decision (continues to act as the guarantor of the non-heavily devaluing exchange policy and to guarantee the price of the bonds in pesos) of limit the amount of cedars (Argentine certificates of deposit, of shares not listed in Argentina) that importers may have aspiring to get dollars at the official price.

That new limitation for companies having the ability to access the $ 129 wholesale dollar marked a end point of private sector expectations which, at a certain point, they will be able to import at the official exchange rate.

The gap (wholesale-blue difference) has been expanded up to 166% and future dollar contracts in Rofex They have skyrocketed in quantity and price. The closing price for October was $ 166, up 3%.

Until last week there was two main players looking for an exchange hedge in the free dollar market and now the companies would merge.

The most important player of the past two years has been the foreign investment fund which, at the time of the government of Alberto Fernandezit had Argentine bonds for the equivalent of US $ 13,000 million, from which they gradually grew up to currently hold a holding estimated at $ 1,000 million.

Those bonuses were sell bonds and receive pesos they used to buy dollars. It is believed that for many months they were the major players in the dollar MEP and “accountants with liquidation”.

The others were the banks satisfying the needs of their customers and third parties, now with greater prominence in the free circuit, are the companies that have realized that the Central will not have the ability to supply them with foreign currency at the official price in the coming months. Is it a hidden devaluation?

In the Central Bank they insist that there will be no jump in the exchange rate (until now Miguel Pesce beat the market that, in the case of hedging in the future dollar, he lost the tug of war) and that the market will be more balanced after August when energy imports drop from $ 2,000 million a month to $ 900 million.

The bet on the decline in demand for dollars to pay for energy imports is insufficient to overturn the expectations of operators who they would only start believing if they saw the Central Bank buying dollars and with a excess exchange result instead of the current one where it appears as almost the only supplier of foreign exchange From the market.

President Alberto Fernández with an index finger and a threatening tone insisted on this they will not “turn his arm” agricultural producers who, from their point of view, have $ 20 trillion in grains accumulated and are reluctant to sell.

On the other hand, producers sitting on their grains take sides behind a valid argument: due to stocks and the exchange gap, Today a producer receives 29% of the international price of soybeans which, according to their calculations, is the lowest percentage in many years.

In a country with a government it does not trust and with a skyrocketing exchange rate and an exchange gap so large that announces some sort of definitionthe producers’ decision to protect themselves by conserving the grains is reasonable. No one is destined to lose to do their job.

The President continues to believe that the triggering of the blue and the retraction in the liquidation of the currencies respond speculative maneuversWill they want to empty the government with a maneuver similar to that of Vice President Cristina Kirchner?

This has already happened and also the blow that implied that the markets stopped lending pesos to the Treasury to cover the fiscal deficit. The crisis of confidence needs new decisions that with anger and threats are unlikely to calm a market that has been traversed by uncertainty and restlessness for weeks.