Hear
The supply of dollars made by the official exchange market today reached a new low in four and a half months: there was hardly any cash business US$172 million, the lowest level since January 15, when the local operation coincided with a holiday in the United States.
It is also a figure 24.6% lower than the one traded yesterday, 32% lower than the one registered last Tuesday and 42.2% lower than the one traded in the second business round of the previous month. “Today was very poor.””observed the operator Nicolas Merinofrom ABC Cambios.
The decline in volume did not prevent the Central Bank (BCRA) from purchasing US$48 million for its reservesthat is, keeping just under 28% of the dollars negotiated.
Even so, in this way the entity commanded by Santiago Bausili acquired US$467 million through interventions in the local market in the last ten business rounds, an amount that contrasts very strongly with the US$1,583 million it had managed to purchase in the ten previous rounds.
“If you take the last five wheels, the purchasing average is even lower and there were days in the red. It is a sign that should not be disregarded, because The low volume in turn triggers the gap and the rise in the gap hits you in expectations. That is, a whole vicious circle is activated.“, warns the economist Hamilcar Collantefrom the Center for Southern Studies (CeSur).
The aforementioned comparisons serve to show that something changed the behavior of the market, a worrying phenomenon at a time when the Central Bank (BCRA) would need to continue buying dollars as it had done until after mid-May.
You don’t even have to explain that You need it to get your reserve holdings out of the “decline” zone once and for all (net at a negative level) and generate the conditions for the Government to advance in disarming the stocks, given that it is clear that it greatly conditions investment, one of the main bets that the Milei administration makes to rescue the economy from the current stagflation situation.
Market operators and analysts are beginning to look puzzled since this occurs in the middle of the “high season” of agricultural liquidations, that is, when They expected to see supply flow more, something that would allow them to supply a recovering import demand, as the access deadlines for almost all productive sectors to the market are met, and would at the same time leave room for the BCRA to continue purchasing reserves at a good pace.
But they believe that today is a complex day to analyze the market, due to the deterioration shown in the local financial climate. “It is something that must also have influenced,” they point out.
However, for some what is being seen exceeds what is happening outside and has to do with the undeniable discomfort that is beginning to exist among agricultural exporters with the effective level that the exchange rate reachedbeing in recent months once again eaten away by local inflation and in a context in which dollarized production costs became very expensive.
For others, it has to do with the change in rates. “With the high rate of the future dollar, the field is financed by selling in the dollar future market, and finances the inventory. Expect a devaluation or increase in the price of raw materials in the future. If they don’t happen, it will be the producer who will be in trouble,” the financial analyst described on social media days ago. Salvador Di Stefano.
The disturbing thing is that the BCRA’s declining purchases, as LA NACION warned yesterdayarrive at a sensitive moment: when that entity faces strong payment commitments in the short term, derived from the possible lack of renewal of the tranche of the swap of currencies signed years ago with China that the Fernández administration used to try to disguise the terminal crisis of the reserves.
It is a fact that causes fear among investors and that, together with the political difficulties that the Government faced in passing laws, led them to once again be suspicious of the Argentine riskas seen by the selling trend that makes both Argentine bonds and stocks fall.
The question here is what factors regenerated that aversion. “I don’t know where the egg is and where the chicken is, but I have no doubt that the sustained rise in financial dollars causes the supply of export currencies to disappear,” Merino postulates.
The curious thing is that, In the present circumstances, the BCRA seems to have become more zealous in the application of its erratic exchange rate policy. In fact, today it left the wholesale dollar frozen again, as he had done days ago. Thus, it closed at $897 per unit for sale, “the same value as yesterday’s closing,” noted operator Gustavo Quintana, from PR Cambios.
From the monetary entity they maintain that they see the market affected by the natural delay in the liquidation of the coarse harvest, after a campaign that had its particularities. “In any case, we will have an offer with less marked seasonality, more extended in time, which is not bad,” they judged after a consultation of THE NATION.
Of course, in parallel, they seem to have begun to take some precautions in this regard. At least that is what communication “A” 8031 published in the last few hours suggests, through which he ordered that companies that issue debt securities and/or promissory notes with a corresponding public offer, denominated and subscribed in foreign currency and whose capital and interest services are payable in foreign currency in the country, They must liquidate what they raised in the exchange market.
This requirement, he clarified, will be unavoidable for companies that subsequently seek to access the official exchange market “for the purposes of servicing their capital and/or interest services.”
