Dollar Today: Free Quote Holds at $202 for the Third Consecutive Day

The free dollar is still trading at $202 for sale. It should be remembered that the informal currency was traded on a $199 floor last Tuesday.

The wholesale dollar is agreed up by ten cents, to $109.61, with an exchange rate gap of 84.3% compared to the informal dollar.

Dollars traded through stock exchange assets are traded around $196 for both the “liquidated spot” and the MEP.

The BCRA board is considering increasing the benchmark rate by 1.5 to 2 percentage points in the short term to adapt the performance to high inflation, a source with direct knowledge of the subject told Reuters.

The monetary institution holds a buyer balance in the wholesale market of about $520 million in the course of March. International reserves fell by about $26 million on Thursday and ended at $37.038 million.

The Senate ended up translating the ratification of the agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) into law, without the presence of the president of the upper house, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Now the agreement will be discussed by the Fund's board, according to an agency spokesman in Washington, Gerry Rice.

Senators discussed the understanding just four days before the due date of the payment of some USD 2,809 million — some $2 billion equivalent in Special Drawing Rights — to the IMF.

It should be recalled that the agreement with the agency establishes a grace period of four and a half years, and extends disbursement payments to 10 years, so the country will begin to cancel the debt in 2026 and end in 2034, with quarterly revisions of the targets.

“Already with the approval of the agreement with the IMF, the Government will today announce measures against inflation, with the attempt to make a political gesture in the face of a higher-than-expected inflation rate in February and which predicts even higher numbers for the coming months, due to the direct impact of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine that raised international commodity values, the latest increase in fuels and the future adjustment of tariffs,” said Research for Traders.

Among the measures that could be announced are the possibility of an adjustment of withholdings for soybean meal and oil from 31% to 33% and a strengthening of trusts that subsidize food prices in local gondolas.

According to private calculations, inflation in March will be at least 5% in a context of tariff recomposition and reserve target that imposes at least one crawling peg of the official exchange rate. In addition, inflation will be imported from the rest of the world both because of the post-emission effect of the pandemic and because of the impact of the war on food and fuel production. In this way, annual inflation by 2022 would have a 60 percent floor.

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