The National Securities Commission (CNV) implemented a new regulation this Monday that prohibits the purchase of dollarized assets for fifteen days after operating in the financial dollar market. Thus, the assets resulting from operations with bonds may not be used for two weeks to acquire Cedears, Negotiable Obligations and/or sovereign securities in dollars. How does this novelty impact the operation of the MEP dollar?
As Juan Ignacio Alra, Portfolio Manager of Southern Trust, explained to Ámbito, “the measure is used to curb what in economics we call arbitrage, which implies that the same asset or financial instrument has different prices in different markets or in the same one and that be used by the investor.
In this case, what was being done was to use the AL30 and GD30 bonds or subsidized dollar vs. other assets buying cheaper dollars. The measure is basically, as explained by the stock market expert Marcelo Bastante, “cutting the maneuver carried out by those who exercised the arbitration taking advantage of the exchange rate differentials resulting from the disparity in prices between bonds that are quoted in pesos and in dollars” .
In other words, the objective is to eliminate some financial speculation maneuvers, known as “curlers”, carried out by some operators to take advantage of the price gap between the bonds used to intervene in the market (AL30 and GD30) and the rest of the sovereign titles.
It is not entirely new, since Quite remembers that something similar was done in the past when dollarization through CEDEARS was not allowed if operations with MEP dollars had been carried out in the last 90 days.
What changes with the new norm?
A fact to take into account, according to Bastante, is that “the new regulations, unlike the previous ones, do not establish a new parking lot, or, rather, do not extend the current ones”, but rather establishes temporary restrictions to carry out dollar operations MEP or CCL.
Thus, according to the analyst Andrés Reschini, “the saver who buys MEP with the instruments intervened or subsidized by the Central Bank (BCRA) to hoard may continue doing so, even with the new regulations, but they will have to wait to buy other assets for 15 days ”.
He explains that it is one more obstacle that tries to avoid the curls and shrink the dollar market through the intervened instruments so that the few ammunition of the BCRA have greater effectiveness on the “blackboard” of the MEP.
And, on the other hand, Alra explains that it will be possible to continue buying dollarized assets except for those who make MEP or CCL dollars and want to use that money to carry out a financial operation again. “Those investors will have to wait 15 days to be able to do it,” she says.
Meanwhile, he points out that, on the side of individuals, it is not so clear if it affects their way of storing dollars or not, so he considers that we will have to wait and see how the rule is applied.
As detailed by Quite, for its application, agents may only carry out customer operations if in the 15 calendar days prior to the request to purchase CEDEARS or other assets touched by this provision, they did not carry out MEP or CCL dollar operations in the segment of bidding competition.
To this end, the client must state by sworn declaration that he has not done so and that he will not carry out similar operations in the next 15 calendar days. “It is easy to verify for the operations that the client arranges with the same agent, but if the client operates with more than one, it becomes more complex,” warns Bastante.
A measure to prop up the BCRA
It is worth mentioning that these types of measures are taken in a context in which there is an alert in the market regarding the reserves of the Central, which are reaching stressful levels. And it is that one of the main faucets for dripping dollars that the monetary regulator has at this moment is the intervention that it carries out in the financial dollar market.
However, for Quite, it is a new rule that adds to the “transitory and conjunctural measures that the Government has been taking and that the only thing they do is that, with greater restrictions, the market naturally seeks alternative methods to cover itself against the rise in prices or expectations of devaluation”.
NOTE IN DEVELOPMENT
Source: Ambito
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