Government to pay $ 300 million to IMF next week

The resources for the payment will come from the coffers of the BCRA. After a 2020 of strong drainage, this year international reserves have started to be reconstituted, driven by the liquidations of agriculture in the midst of soaring commodity prices and in full force of the exchange rate. Thus, the entity chaired by Miguel Pesce managed to buy back all the currencies it had to sell during the last semester to avoid devaluation and gross assets again exceeded 40,000 million dollars. In net terms, private consultants value them between $ 5,000 and $ 6,500 million.

The official intention is to take advantage of the high season of foreign exchange settlements (April-June) to increase the accumulation of reserves and ensure greater firepower, which will allow us to get through the third pre-electoral quarter without skipping. the gap. By then, the US $ 4,354 million corresponding to Argentina will arrive for the distribution of SDRs that the IMF will make as part of its policy of expanding global liquidity to mitigate the impact of the corona crisis. . Although the destination of these funds is in tension within the ruling party: as Ámbito said weeks ago, Casa Rosada plans to use them to inflate the reserves but the bloc of senators of the Frente de Todos, which responds to Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, encourages their use for health and social policies.

In any case, the available currencies are not sufficient to honor all the foreign currency commitments that the country has to come in 2021 without dealing a major blow to the reserves. After the restructuring with bondholders, most of the maturities are concentrated between the IMF and the Paris Club. In between, they total US $ 7.6 billion and that is why the government is negotiating a rescheduling of large capital payments.

The next big stumbling block will be the nearly $ 2.4 billion that will expire with the Paris Club on May 30, with a 60-day grace period before going into default. To restructure that debtThis group of creditor countries is asking for an agreement to be sealed with the IMF beforehand, but this is not the main hypothesis today. For this reason, a “bridge” is also negotiated with the Club to extend the deadline until the program with the Fund is finalized. It was one of the axes of the agenda that Minister Martín Guzmán took a few days ago for his tour of Europe and that President Alberto Fernández will take to different countries of the same continent on the trip he will perform from May 10.

Meanwhile, the schedule for annual payments to the IMF includes four installments for interest and two for principal. The first interest payment was made in February for US $ 313 million. The second will take place next week, and then there will be two more, in August and November, for around $ 400 million each. The first two capital commitments – just under $ 1.9 billion each – fall in September and December. While there is still no deal by September, one option the government is not ruling out is to reverse that expiration with part of the SDR the country will receive.