The blue moves back $22 and falls to $473

With the blue dollar on the verge of $500, yesterday the Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa, said via Twitter that they would use “all the tools of the State to order this situation.” Then, after a strong intervention in the bond market, financial exchange rates closed the day with some falls. Today, that effect is also contagious on the blue dollar, which registers a sharp drop, after eight consecutive rounds of increases.

In the third wheel of the week, the parallel exchange rate sells for $473 on the streets of the city porteña, a setback of $22 compared to the previous day (-4.5%). Although official interventions do not have a direct impact on the US banknote that is sold informallythis quote usually converges with the financial ones. The greater the mismatch in the values, the more incentives there are to carry out arbitrages (buy “cheap” in one market and resell it “expensive” in the other).

“As in any currency run, the dollars rose a lot and quickly. That made the informal tables not buy more bills yesterday, because they wanted to wait to have a counterpart, to know that later they would be able to sell those dollars. That is to say, not even the caves considered that the blue at $500 could be sustained and they did not want to pay too much. Let’s remember that a week ago it was trading at $400, it was a significant jump, 25% in a few days. Likewise, an intervention by the Government, with the Central Bank and the Treasury, was necessary to calm the financial dollars and show some control of what was happening,” said financial analyst Christian Buteler.

The escalation of free dollars began on Monday of last week and, for the economist, it was due to multiple reasons. Partly, impacted the fiscal result of the first quarter of the year, which was worse than expected and the goal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was not met. This put in doubt the future disbursements that the multilateral organization would make and how the payment commitments would be dealt with. The same was explained because the arrival of the agro dollar It did not cause a flood of foreign currency as expected within the Government and the Central Bank was even forced to put itself in a position to sell reserves. The inflation upward, more stocks exchange and negative real interest rates They completed the picture.

Hoy, the MEP dollar appears on the screens $444,86, a drop of $2 compared to the previous close (-0.2%). On the other hand the counted with liquidation (CCL) is traded at $454,26, a daily drop of $11.70 (-2.5%).

“Yesterday the novelty was that the Government decided to intervene the financial dollars using currencies that add to the ‘fire power’ of dollarized bonds. Interventions are likely to continue to keep financial dynamics in check. However, to maintain this effort for several more days can have a significant cost for reservations, variable about which there is precisely a deep fear given its low level ”, warned from the Delphos Investment stock company.

The Government began to be very present in the bond market from the end of January, when it announced the debt repurchase. In this way, he managed to keep financial dollars stable during February. But, with the quarterly review of the goals agreed with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the foreign authorities recommended that this strategy be stopped as much as possible. For a time they had to put a stop to this practice. Until yesterday, with the currency run, Sergio Massa obtained the go-ahead from the multilateral body to once again have an active position in the bond market.

“But it would have changed the method of intervention. Instead of only going out to sell nominals against pesos, yesterday they went out to buy bonds against dollars to soften the rise in the CCL. In other words, until now, we have seen that the sale of titles is carried out against pesos, which generates an ephemeral effect on financial dollars and collapses the bond parity. Let’s remember that the only way to effectively lower financial dollars is by selling genuine dollars, which is exactly what we assume they did yesterday”, warned Personal Investment Portfolio (PPI).

In these days, there was also a change of strategy regarding the official wholesale exchange rate: they accelerated the pace of daily devaluations. Today, it trades at $221.57, an advance of $0.70 compared to the previous session (+0.3%).

“The BCRA accelerated the rate of depreciation of the official exchange rate, reaching maximums in the management of Alberto Fernández. At a monthly rate, a rate of crawling peg of 6.9%. But considered from April 18, the rate of devaluation reaches 9.1%, with an effective annual rate of 188.54%,” said Ignacio Morales, an analyst at Wise Capital. The gap against blue is 114%.

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