From the United States, Javier Milei and Luis Caputo made a new announcement to gain time and stop the growth of the gap between the official dollar rate and the financial ones. Breaking a central axis of the official discourse, they stated that they will intervene in the cash market with settlement by selling the foreign currency obtained from exports. The resolution, as already happened during the management of Macri and Alberto Fernández, is destined to fail. If they continue to apply their plan, the consequences for workers and their families will be increasingly serious.
The peak of the blue dollar on Friday, which reached $1,500, led them to improvise a far-fetched explanation: the problem would be the issuance of pesos generated by the purchase of dollars from exporters. For the Government, they would not be intervening in the market from the State, but rather reinforcing the “Zero Issuance”. It is a play on words, in fact they are retrying what Caputo himself did in 2018 and Massa in 2023. The underlying problem remains the same, a fraudulent external debt that is impossible to pay and a dependent productive matrix in which more dollars are leaking than entering.
This Monday, the prices of both the blue, the cash with “liqui” and the MEP (stock market dollar) fell in anticipation of a greater supply due to state intervention. The Central Bank (BCRA) had been buying foreign currency by postponing the payment of imports, but it was just getting close to leaving the negative territory, so the Government’s margin to stop the rise of the parallel dollars is very narrow. This was reflected in the private banks that saw their shares fall and in the bonds of the external debt that the creditors came out to sell, causing their price to fall.
The government is trying to reduce the exchange rate gap by burning reserves to avoid devaluing and causing inflation to soar again as in January. But the farm bosses and the IMF are pushing for a jump in the exchange rate and there are no recent precedents of them being defeated in such a battle.
For those who depend on a salary or a pension to survive, neither a devaluation nor the squandering of dollars to support the exchange rate are positive alternatives. In the first case, the rise in prices would be a new blow to their income as already happened at the beginning of the year; in the second, according to Milei and Caputo’s roadmap, the deepening of the recession leads to a multiplication of unemployment. In both cases, they cannot rule out explosions that accelerate the times and provoke the plundering of the great majority, in a situation that is already difficult due to the increase in poverty. Without a break with the IMF, the expropriation of the large grain companies and the establishment of a monopoly of foreign trade to put an end to the flight of foreign currency, there is no way out of this vicious and impoverishing circle.
Source: www.laizquierdadiario.com
