He National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INDEC) will announce this Tuesday the Consumer Price Index (CPI) of February, which According to private estimates, it would be below the 20.6 percent of January but above 15 percent, which is the maximum number that the Government expects, based on the expectation that it is “closer to 10% than 20 %”.
Inflationary pressure on prices continues, although according to the Executive and the consulting firms, there was a slower pace of increases last month, which would reflect a slowdown compared to the strong rise in the CPI in January.
With an evident consensus for a slower pace of price increases, but with differences in the degree of this decrease, expectations are growing for the official measurement of the February CPI, which INDEC will announce this Tuesday, March 12.
The Minister of Economy, Luis Caputo, He predicted that “this month inflation will be closer to 10 percent than 20 percent,” ensuring that “they will see a substantial drop that is a product of the fiscal and monetary control that is being carried out.”
At the end of last week, the official inflation indicator in the City of Buenos Aires was published, which serves as a preview of the national data, which marked a price increase of 14.1% during February and accumulated an increase of 264.5%. % in the last 12 months.
This monthly variation is a sample of what the National Government expects.
In this way, the Buenos Aires CPI reflected a drop of more than seven percentage points compared to the January record (when it had reached 21.7%).
In the first two months of 2024, inflation in the City reached 38.9 percent.
The Market Expectations Survey (REM), prepared by the Central Bank (BCRA) with the projections of the main market players and consultants, estimated that the price index for February reached 15.8 percent, while for the accumulated annual increase of 210.2 percent at the end of this year.
Workers’ inflation, prepared by the Metropolitan University for Education and Work (UMET) and the Center for Concertation and Development (CCD), was along the same lines, predicting 15.8 percent in February, which which reflects a deceleration of 6.8 percent compared to January.
In the first two months of the year, the price variation reached an increase of 41.8 percent and has accumulated an increase of 282.3% in the last 12 months.
The Retail Price Survey of the consulting firm Eco Go, for its part, estimated inflation for the second month of the year one tenth above previous forecasts, placing it at 15.9 percent monthly.
The consulting firm C&T, meanwhile, measured a CPI of 16.3% in February, falling compared to the 19.6% that its own survey showed in January.
Despite the slowdown, the year-on-year variation rose to 275%, the highest since March 1991.
From the firm they analyzed that “the strong adjustments in various regulated prices explained a large part of the behavior of the month.”
“The rise in public transportation caused the transportation item to increase 47% monthly. The adjustment in electricity that was implemented in the middle of the month was combined with a significant increase in the salary of building managers to generate a variation of 38% monthly in the housing sector. In both cases, these are movements well above the average,” they added.
In the measurements of the Libertad y Progreso Foundation, the February Price Index reached 16.8%, slowing down 3.8 percentage points compared to the official measurement in January (20.6%).
According to these calculations, in the first two months of the year, the CPI accumulates a rise of 40.9% and the interannual variation reaches 288%, the highest value since March 1991.
From the entity they explained that the evolution of the month was influenced by a substantially high variation during the first week, due to the update of rates in AMBA public transport and contributed that “from the second week of the month, the data converged to variations in the range of 2%-3% weekly, maintaining the trend of the last fortnight of January and reaching values similar to those of September 2023”.
Source: Ambito
