The gap between the official dollar and the CCL dollar rises to 30% – 09/16/2019

The Dollar Counted With Liqui (CCL), which is used to treasure foreign currencies abroad, rises again at the beginning of the week and the gap with the official dollar is above 30%. Today the wholesale dollar rises 0.4% to $ 56.31 and the CCL rebounds 1% and Quoted at $ 73.50, which brings the gap to 30%.

The CCL is the operation that allows companies to buy Argentine papers in the local market and sell them abroad to achieve currency exchange for "hoarding." After the decision of the Central Bank that as of September 1 prevents legal persons from buying dollars to treasure, the CCL was charging outside. For companies to do this operation has a cost: today it is 30% and until last week it was around 20%.

While the current gap is far from the distance he knew to keep at the peak of the Kirchnerist stocks, when he touched 80%, for analysts The worrying thing is the speed of expansion. In the K era, the gap took 18 months to reach a distance of 30%. Here it happened in only five weeks, the lapse between the elections of August 11 and today. While the gap began to grow after STEP was empowered with restrictions which established the Central to purchase currency.

On September 1 and after seeing the 29% of dollar deposits and have lost US $ 16,000 million of reserves, the Central put a limit of $ 10,000 for the monthly purchase on the part of the human persons and arranged that the natural persons will not be able to acquire currencies for hoarding, although they can do it to pay debts and imports.

The gap also fed back as the monetary authority Restricted access to the greenback. This was what happened between Wednesday and Thursday, when the Central and the National Securities Commission took resolutions to put an end to the "financial loop" that savers and investors had been doing to get a share of the different legal exchange rates.

Until that time, natural persons could buy dollars in the official market, use them to buy Argentine bonds and sell them at the value of the dollar or MEP to do so a difference of up to 7% in hard currency. But the new regulations provided that the period to specify that operation will pass from 24 hours to 12 business days, which added risk and took away the MEP dollar, which is currently listed on $ 69.40.

From GMA Capital they state that with the new regulations, "the" rulo "safe and short term mutated in a more risky and extensive operation. Now the price risk is significant because the waiting and settlement deadlines amplify volatility and uncertainty in a process that takes 12 business days from end to end. "

How will the gap evolve from now on? Analysts agree that it will depend on what happens with the restrictions to access the dollar. "If restrictions increase, the gap will grow ", says Gustavo Neffa, of Research for Traders. Some alarms in that regard sounded last week, when the IRSA company had difficulty turning currencies abroad to pay its creditors the maturities of a Negotiable Obligation." This could anticipate a inconvenient for creditors of foreign currency securities whose payment route goes through the Caja de Valores before reaching foreign accounts, "says GMA.

However, from the Central Bank they argue that those inconveniences should not be repeated and for this, in the next few hours they will be sure to polish the resolutions so that all the companies can fulfill their debt commitments. They also ratified that there will be no difficulties in complying with the payment of imports, although days ago some automakers found that they could not access all the dollars they needed to pay their suppliers.

"The crux of this is trust. Do we believe the Central Bank that there will be no more difficulties or new restrictions? As long as that trust is weak, the gap will be maintained. And it can increase if the CCL starts to become the market reference dollar"says a reserve analyst.