The bleeding of reserves continues in the run-up to the negotiation with the IMF

Tomorrow part of the economic team will travel to Washington to underpin the renegotiation with the IMF.

The deputy minister Gabriel Rubinstein, the deputy minister of the BCRA, Lisandro Cleri and the head of INDEC, Marco Lavagna, will get on the plane. The objective of the technical delegation will be for the Fund not only to advance some US$ 10,788 million of the remaining disbursements for 2023, but also an extra advance of US$ 1,800 corresponding to 2024, in order to swell the meager reserves of the Central Bank for the remainder of the of the year, and especially with the proximity of the elections.

The question is: if the new agreement comes to fruition, how much of those dollars will allow the international organization that the Government allocate to intervene in the exchange market and keep the exchange rate depressed and the gap stable.

It should be noted that the monetary entity was also intervening in the dollar bond market and kept financial exchange rates stable, although at a lower daily rate, at a rate of US$36 million against US$77 million per day in May.

The other key question is what the Monetary Fund will ask for with respect to the official exchange rate. Increasingly closer to the elections, the Government will avoid a sudden devaluation at all costs, at most an acceleration of the crawling peg rhythm and will administer the exchange rate correction by the dropper.

In turn, another edge will be to determine what will happen to the refunds to the Fund, if the Government manages to postpone them until 2024. The capital maturities to be faced until December.

Regarding this last point, today the BCRA only has US$ 1,600 million in SDRs within its arcades. In other words, without new disbursements, you don’t have anything to deal with that end-of-month payment.

Bleeding. The loss of reserves of the monetary authority does not cease. On Friday it parted with $184 million in the MULC, the highest daily amount in three months.

In the week it totaled US$199 million and in the month it lost reserves for US$341 million to meet the needs of the market.

Also, US$ 320 million of the reserves were used between June 1 and 13 in the financial dollar market in order to contain the exchange rate gap.

This resulted in gross reserves reaching 32 billion dollars, and net international reserves under the IMF methodology remaining in negative territory of US$ 1.8 billion.

The Chinese swap gave a bit of air, but it is not enough. Now without the soybean 3 dollar and without the disbursements from the Fund to swell the suffocating reserves, the intervention of the BCRA in the exchange market will be reflected in the expansion of the red of net international reserves, which today are negative for US $1.8 billion.

soybean dollar Some economists estimate that the implementation of a new differential exchange rate, in this case it would be the fourth, would be the best option to increase the income of dollars to the arcades of the Central. However, note that it should be a new “soybean dollar” and not, for example, a “corn dollar”, which uses a rise in food prices.

With the three previous versions, a total of US$ 16 billion was achieved.

“Given the need to rebuild reserves in a period in which the dollarization of portfolios is intensifying, and considering that part of the harvest has not yet been raised in a scenario in which the incentives are aligned to liquidate only what is fair and necessary, We do not rule out that in the coming months a new edition of the soybean dollar will be implemented to encourage currency settlement and increase the supply of dollars,” explained Santiago Manoukian, Ecolatina’s economic advisor.

For his part, Salvador Vitelli, head of research at Romano Group, told PROFILE that “the point is what type of exchange it would be. I would say a minimum of $400 to start thinking that he has the ability to seduce the producer in order to capture those dollars.”

However, the Ministry of Economy continues to dismiss for the moment the implementation of a new differential exchange rate for agriculture.