As Economy Minister Martín Guzmán announced in a radio interview, the Central restricted access to foreign currency for luxury goods such as luxury cars and airplanes, while expanding access to foreign currency for small and medium-sized companies up to 115% of the imported value in 2021, from a previously established limit of 105%, up to a maximum of 1 million dollars. On the other hand, it extended the import financing system to the system used for purchases with non-automatic licenses.
For the director of Anker Latin America, however, these measures will have a cost, beyond curbing the bleeding of BCRA reserves: “It is a short sheet, this brings less activity and more inflation due to the increase in the replacement cost of merchandise.”
Regarding the impact of the tightening of the stocks on alternative exchange rates, such as the blue dollar and the financial dollar, Furiase maintained that “The excel of a model with more monetary issue, more restrictions on the foreign exchange market and greater delay in the real exchange rate, should close with more pressure on the CCL, but the timing of that is not clear and the potential power of intervention also plays of public entities in such a small market”.
Argentina, which has had capital controls since 2019 to protect the scarce reserves of the Central Bank, registered an increase in its imports of 53.1% in May while exports grew 20.7%. Especially energy imports were the ones that generated the increase in the demand for foreign exchange, after the rise in prices generated by the war in Ukraine.
“The Board of Directors of the Central Bank today (Monday) adapted the foreign trade payment system, to respond to the extraordinary needs of foreign currency to meet energy imports, in order to sustain economic growth and the development of SMEs, avoiding maneuvers speculation on imports,” the monetary authority said in a statement.
In the first five months of the year, energy imports grew 205% compared to the same period in 2021, totaling 4.64 billion dollars, Guzmán explained.
Source: Ambito
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