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Soybean dollar: Is it the beginning of the currency split?

Soybean dollar: Is it the beginning of the currency split?

We lost the hoard value and to some extent the benchmark pricing of our currency; many decades of inflation inoculated us with the mistrust gene about weight. In Argentina it is not enough for us to have enough exports to pay for what we import. Our trade surplus has to be much larger to supply the demand of the several million Argentines who take refuge in that currency to preserve their savings.

This leads us to have recurring crises linked to the extreme scarcity of reserves in the Central Bank, which impacts the flow of imports (and therefore the level of GDP growth to which we can aspire) and the general prices of electricity. economy, mostly impacted by the value of the foreign currency.

The Government has been administering the single exchange market, dosing imports and intervening tepidly in the market to avoid jumps in financial dollars that prevent the gap between them and the official price from skyrocketing.

The most liberal sectors of the economy generally propose a liberalization of the exchange scheme. As a final objective, there is no doubt that we should aim for that. But it is no less true that the current economy cannot process a mega devaluation without inflation spiraling to a socially unacceptable level.

And yet, we cannot solve the external crisis if we do not address the need to accumulate reserves. The measure that has just been sanctioned by the new economic team commanded by Minister Sergio Massa, achieves a very sensible scheme because, on the one hand, it proposes sufficiently attractive incentives for the producer to decide to liquidate the soybean that has been hoarding in its silos and, on the other , avoids a traditional devaluation whose effect on the prices of the economy would have been very complex to process.

This kind of exchange split for soybeans contemplates a dollar value of 200, something like 50% to the official dollar and the other 50% to the MEP. The incentive will be valid for the month of September for everyone who settles and/or fixes the value of the sale, even if for logistical reasons the shipment could take a few more weeks. It represents a 50% improvement in the value perceived by producers and exporters of soybeans (and their derivatives), which is undoubtedly a significant improvement for the farmer’s pocket.

Due to the form and tone of the announcements, it is impossible not to see, in addition to an intelligent proposal to strengthen BCRA reserves, a gesture of conciliatory approach and different from what we have been observing from the government towards the agribusiness sector. Congratulations that it is so.

Of course there are earrings. Surely the economic team is already working on them. On the one hand, this kind of unfolding towards the MEP should continue to deepen and add, in the coming weeks, consumption abroad, luxury imports and services abroad by programmers. That would be an indisputable sign of hope towards a gradual but sustained path out of the stocks.

And once relative prices achieve a greater alignment, some kind of tourniquet or temporary anti-inflationary shock will also be necessary to help us retrace the indexing process that continues to fuel the inflationary spiral.

There is not little that remains, but today we took a huge and fundamental step towards that.

Source: Ambito

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