The president of Argentina, Alberto Fernández, said this Thursday (30) that the shortage of dollars suffered by the national economy is due to the fact that the country is growing ” too much”, accused the opposition of causing imbalances in the exchange rate and claimed that “speculation continues to be one of the causes of inflation”, a chronic Argentine problem.
“Argentina today has problems, it is of course it has. The dollars that are needed to be able to continue to invest and continue to generate production are lacking, and that is why we take care of the dollars, because we do not want the dollars to go away in travel, we want them to continue to produce and to provide employment”, declared the president during the inauguration of a textile factory in the province of La Rioja.
And he observed: “We have a problem with dollars because we are growing a lot and we need dollars to be able to import inputs. And we are growing so much that, although we have record exports, we don’t have enough dollars due to the amount of inputs we have to import to continue producing”. In this sense, Fernández argued that the country has “a growth crisis”.
The price of the US dollar in the informal market – which citizens resort to due to the severe restrictions on obtaining foreign currency in the market oficial – has been breaking records for weeks, in the context of investors’ distrust of the constantly devalued Argentine peso and of assets in local currency.
All this in the midst of a scenario of dwindling international reserves. The government, in the agreement signed in March with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to refinance the US$ 45 billion loan signed in 2018 with the management of Mauricio Macri (2015-2019), has committed to increase its net reserves by US$ 5.8 billion this year.
In the event of this On Thursday, Fernández again attacked his predecessor’s economic management: “We came after those who indebted Argentina like no one else,” he argued.
On the scarcity of diesel, a fuel widely used in the agricultural sector in a country that is fundamentally an agro-exporter, Fernández claimed that the rest of the world also suffers from it, and criticized the fact that the agro-industrial sector had announced on Wednesday that it would hold a day of protest in July.
