Facundo Iglesia 
The informal dollar exchange rate, popularly known as the “blue dollar,” reached today the record-high value of AR$499 per unit — a AR$4 increase in just one day and AR$6 in the week. The jump comes after a week in which the currency was relatively stable.
“It’s to be expected that parallel exchange rates, among them the ‘blue dollar,’ would go up over time, following the general increase in the nominal values of the Argentine economy,” Santiago Manoukian, the research lead of the Ecolatina consulting firm, told the Herald. “It would be weird if they stood still.”
For weeks, Argentine social media users have been posting memes of the yaguareté — the animal portrayed on the AR$500 bills — fighting against representations of the US dollar, implying that the tender is “resisting” becoming the value of one dollar. Just one peso shy, the joke became a trending topic over the course of the day.
Manoukian thinks that in Argentina’s “flimsy macroeconomy,” it would be healthier for the exchange rates to not stay at the same value for a long time to then, for example, increase by 20% in 15 days.
Christian Buteler, president of Buteler Financial Services, agreed.
“If instead of rising at the same pace as the rest of the prices in the economy, [the US dollar] did so with sharp jumps, it would end up with an immediate transfer to prices and an outflow of dollar deposits due to uncertainty,” he tweeted.
The official exchange rate is valued at AR$276.5 meaning that the gap between the two rates is just under 90%, at 89.2%
“The government is complying with its goal of keeping the gap relatively stable and anesthetized below 100%,” Manoukian said, contending that the ‘blue dollar’ is not at a “crisis value.”
“In real terms, it’s well below what we had in July 2020, after [former Economy Minister] Martín Guzmán resigned which, in today’s prices, would be AR$580,” he said.
What to expect
Argentina is going through a major international reserve scarcity crisis, which deepened during this year’s historic drought. As the country is renegotiating its program with the International Monetary Fund and further incorporating the yuan into its battered economy, international reserves are at a record-low negative US$6.5 billion, according to Ecolatina.
“The government will do everything possible to reduce exchange rate pressures, but they will still be there,” Manoukian said. “There is no margin for a new agro dollar [preferential exchange rate for agricultural exporters] to have the same performance it had in September. At that point last year, there were about 24 million tons of soybeans to sell, now there are less than 10 million.”
Manoukian also said that, in the second half of the year, the Central Bank tends to sell more reserves than it gets in the first part. With the upcoming elections, he also said it’s likely that investors will increasingly dollarize their portfolios.
“The primaries and the general elections will be very important milestones to determine which kind of tension there will be in the exchange market,” he said.
