The blue dollar started the week down 10 pesos | AND…

The blue dollar posted a sharp decline of 10 pesos on Monday to close at 162 pesos. The activities of this illegal segment maintain high volatility for two reasons: the low volume of transactions carried out on this parallel market and the speculative use of businesses and city operators of this price in an attempt to form devaluation expectations.

In the rest of the financial markets in dollars, a slight increase of 0.6% was recorded at the beginning of the week, which led to counted with customs clearance at 147.44 pesos. This dollarization price of virgin assets through the Stock Exchange has moved in line with the quotation of the savings dollar which ended on Monday at 141.24 pesos (up 0.4%).

The exchange difference between the retail dollar and cash with settlement is 70 percent. The spread between the retail dollar and savings is 65 percent. They are aligned values ​​and meet the first objective of the Ministry of the Economy when it launched the last week of October a series of measures to control the instability of exchange rates. By then the difference between the agent and the cash settlement had exceeded 100%.

Sources close to the Palacio de Hacienda assured the newspaper that one of the decisions to be made now is what to do with the tax surcharges on the savings dollar. “As long as the advance to the profit account is maintained, the exchange rate for accumulation will have a 65% spread. This puts a floor on that of other financial dollars and it is not clear that with this difference – which is still high – there will be no more incentives to delay exports and increase imports“Said the source consulted.

Difficulties to support international reserves they are the main problem of the gap. Among the operators, they estimated that on Monday the Central Bank was able to buy 50 million dollars on the foreign exchange market. During the month, the entity accumulates a positive balance of nearly $ 100 million for the first time since mid-year. The numbers are not, however, sufficient to compensate interventions carried out in recent months. The monetary authority has had to part with about $ 4.3 billion to maintain the trade exchange rate so far this year.

For their part bond prices in foreign currencies they have marked increases for all expiration dates. Bonar 2035 was the one that increased the most with an increase of 1.1%. Increases in the price of government securities were also observed in the mode of transactions in pesos. The 2035 peso-traded Bonar rose 2.2%. Country risk ended at 1,321 points with a drop of 12 points.

On the side of equities there was a strong rebound in asset prices. The Buenos Aires stock market marked an increase of 2.4 percent, but there were companies with increases of up to 8 percent. The same has happened with Argentine companies listed in New York. Banks grew at a rate of 5%. The rebound of one of the companies most affected by the pandemic stood out: Despegar, which rose 11.8% on the day.

The news of success in the testing phases of a the new vaccine continued to improve the climate for international markets. The main world stock markets rose and companies in emerging countries dedicated to the energy business (mainly oil) rose above 6% on Monday.