Massa is confident in the approval of the third revision of the program with the IMF

Economy Minister Sergio Massa was confident this Wednesday in Washington that Argentina will comply with the third revision of the program with the International Monetary Fund, which will allow it to unlock an outlay of 5.8 billion dollars by December 2022, after last Friday the council approved the second revision of the Argentine program.

Massa met this Wednesday afternoon with the director of the West Department of the organization Ilan Goldfajn and Luis Cubeddu, head of the Argentine mission, with whom he discussed how he discussed the outcome of the vote of the IMF board of directors. gave the green light to the second payment of the program, for 3,800 million dollars which were credited on Tuesday.

It was a “very relaxed” cordial meeting, according to sources close to the minister, and after Massa managed to reach the target of reserves and limits on funding from the Central Bank to the Treasury, two objectives that were also achieved in the third quarter, which anticipates a good result for the third review which will formally begin in November, explained one of the officials accompanying him here.

for pasta, “Also in the third quarter the objectives of reserves and assistance to the Treasury were reached and the only thing left to discuss with the IMF is the fiscal objective.“, explained the same source, who noted that despite this side may suffer some quarterly deviations, stressed that in the long term the annual target will be reached that the Argentine fiscal deficit will fall to 2.5% of GDP.

The same source confided that one of the Fund’s points of interest was inflation in the coming months, to which Massa anticipated that in October the numbers will be lower than in September, which would officially stand at around 6.9%, according to private projections. , as the INDEC result will be known this Friday.

On Tuesday, the Fund released global growth projections and for Argentina it predicted that it will grow by 4%, while it estimated that inflation will grow by 95% this year and 60% next year, in line with the Budget 2023.

Furthermore, and despite the crisis imposed by the war in Ukraine, Argentina was among the countries with the lowest fiscal deficit forecast for this year among emerging countries.

Massa, who arrived to participate in the Annual Assembly of the IMF and the World Bank, was accompanied by his technical team led by Deputy Minister Gabriel Rubinstein and made up of the chief economic consultant, Leonardo Madcur.

After the meetings of the day at the IMF, Massa went to the IDB to participate in the discussion of the Finance Ministers organized by that organization, as part of the 56th meeting of the Network of Central Banks and Ministries of Finance of Latin America and of the Caribbean.

There he stressed that Argentina had to “double effort to achieve the reserve accumulation program targets and the 2.5% of GDP fiscal targets for this year, essentially due to the impact of the increase in energy”.

He also wonders whether the resources that Latin American countries allocate to finance the IDB, which they then return as funds for infrastructure works, should be considered “development investments” and that “is stupid“that other multilateral organizations calculate it as a deficit, since “Who condemns our countries to be poor”.

There, in addition to Rubinstein and Madcur, he was accompanied by the person in charge of relations with the Bodies, Marco Lavagna, by the director of the Central Bank, Lisandro Cleri, by the advisor for International Affairs, Gustavo Martinez Pandiani, and by his advisor for communication Santiago Garcia. Vazquez.

Another excluded point for the Argentine government in relations with the IMF, at least in the short term, is the use of the Resilience Funds, which emerged after the pandemic and which was formally launched this Wednesday, as announced by the head of the financial institution, Kristalina Georgieva, in the framework of the Annual Assembly.

This fund, for which Argentina would correspond to approximately 1,300 million dollarsit could not be operational for the country before a year and a half when the rollover of the current program with the IMF ends, explained the same source close to Massa.

Following the meeting with the IDB, the Argentine official held bilateral meetings with his peers from Mexico and Turkey, and then went to the working dinner of the G20 finance ministers, where he will meet his peers from the G20 and with Georgieva .