Buenos Aires, Sept. 24 (EFE) .- Argentinians’ mistrust of their currency and their country’s financial system led them to have saved $ 233,323 million “under the mattress” in the second quarter of this year. year, according to the National Statistics and Census Institute, more than five times the debt that Argentina owes to the International Monetary Fund and which could be channeled towards the investments that the country needs to develop.

It is dollars that “may be in a safe in an Argentinian bank, but being in a safe is not loaned”, or it is money that “is hidden in people’s homes in Argentina. Argentina “or” is in offshore accounts, it could come from Uruguay, the USA, certain tax havens “, explained the founding partner of Alberdi Partners, Marcos Buscaglia.

The scale of what Argentines keep outside of the financial system, which reaches 55% of Argentina’s GDP, “is a lot of money,” Buscaglia said, and “it’s a lot more money than it is. there are some in the Argentinian financial system “. since he calculated that the deposits amount to about 67 billion dollars at the parallel exchange rate, which citizens have access to due to the strong restrictions on purchasing from the official.

INFLATION AND CONFISCATIONS

“It shows mistrust”, said Buscaglia, because this form of saving which has lasted for decades is due to “the fear of confiscation of deposits, of devaluations (of the Argentine peso), of inflationary instability”.

Argentina suffers from a history of high inflation – it reached 51.4% per year last August – hyperinflation, devaluations which jump – today the gap between the official exchange rate and the parallel is 88% – and an exchange rate that, when it opens, serves to dollarize.

“The likelihood of a Bonex plan is not zero,” said Buscaglia, referring to the measure that placed bonds on bank deposits in 1989; while recalling the “corralito” of 2001, which prevented withdrawing money from bank accounts; or the failure of some attempts to use asset indexing programs, which included political intervention between 2007 and 2015 of the official inflation index.

PHYSICAL TICKETS

The propensity of Argentines to save on physical dollar bills was pointed out by the president of the Argentine Central Bank, Miguel Pesce, before the Council of the Americas at the end of last August.

Source of the article

Disclaimer: This article is generated from the feed and is not edited by our team.