Macri followed from Los Abrojos the frenzy of economic team meetings

An unusual Sunday and under the undeniable tension accumulated in the faces and the private conversations, the government of Mauricio Macri accelerated yesterday the installation of urgent measures to avoid a new escalation of the dollar today.

The meetings, throughout the weekend, followed the need to send clear signals to the market and savers before tomorrow's opening. With the permission of President Mauricio Macri since the fifth Los Abrojos, the President of the Central Bank, Guido Sandleris, has received at the headquarters of the entity representatives of major banks. He was with him, the Minister of Finance, Hernán Lacunza, with whom he defined before Saturday the capital control measures published in the Official Journal, which set a limit of $ 10,000 per month for the purchase of natural persons.

Early in the morning, Sandleris had convened the Central Board of Directors and agreed on the terms of the resolution regulating Decree 609/19, which also requires exporting companies to sell their dividends within a maximum of five business days and forbid them to buy dollars for accumulation. It was also agreed that Lacunza, according to official sources, will explain the new measures at a press conference and before the opening of the markets.

"There were several lines of action, it was decided to carry out this task," said an officer close to the chief of staff, Marcos Peña, who followed the "preventive" initiative via online discussions and telephone conversations with the economic authorities. The "reperfilation" of long-term debt with private parties and the IMF, announced Wednesday, "was insufficient" given the scale of the crisis, they said before the chief of staff,

"When you're on the ropes, you have to go ahead, but it's very difficult, because Alberto Fernández wants all this not to happen," said another partisan supporter. Peña sees "closes, and knowing that going down is not option," and Fernandez "is trying to blow that up," he said. "He could play for or against stability, he played against," said a leader who is familiar with the Chief of Staff's thinking.

Hope

With a mix of information and voluntarism, other macrismo members hoped that the exchange controls established by the Central Bank would work, at least for a few months. "The situation should calm down because no one can earn a dollar," said a former macro executive. Another referent close to the president has put his hopes on Lacunza, which is "less burned, with better ideas and more fresh" than other members of the government in crisis.

At the end of the afternoon, they told the Minister of Finance that "what has been decided has nothing to do with the K shares, it deals with small and medium-sized savers," he said. one of his spokespersons. Tomorrow at noon, Lacunza will meet in the office of the Minister of the Interior, Rogelio Frigerio, the "negotiators" of the ruling party in Congress (Emilio Monzó, Federico Pinedo, Miguel Angel Pichetto and Sebastián de Luca), in order to define the strategy to obtain the approval of the extension of the payment terms of the bonds and the IMF.

The sentiment expressed by officials and leaders was also sad. "It is unfortunate that the country continues to take care of us," said one official from Buenos Aires and one from Buenos Aires. Neither María Eugenia Vidal, nor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, nor a large part of the government took part in the decisions of the weekend, although several offices of the Casa Rosada affirmed that "the emergency plan in case of calm markets had already been exposed in previous meetings, "said several spokesmen.

"We pray that everything can be stabilized," they said to the head of the government of Buenos Aires, who maintains – as well as the governor of Buenos Aires and the other mayors of Cambiemos in el Conurbano – campaigns "separate" from national, in order to support some key districts and avoid (as recognized by several leaders of the national campaign in private) that Kirchnerism "keeps everything".

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