Argentina’s Economy Minister Martín Guzmán said the country seeks to avoid making payments to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) between 2021 and 2024, according to an interview published by the newspaper La Nación.
“The goal is very clear: first, we don’t want to face payments with the Fund in the period 2021 to 2024,” Guzman explained in the interview.
“We have to clear the horizon of the financial burden in the coming years and we are going to that point. That’s going to require negotiations that are going to take a while,” he added.
The imf deal will come after Argentina successfully bypassed the renegotiation of its bulging debt. In recent weeks he announced that he managed to restructure 99% of his debt under foreign law for about $65 billion.
On the other hand, Guzman also concluded the debt redemption under local law for about $41 billion with an acceptance of 98.8% of creditors.
President Alberto Fernández’s government will send the 2021 draft budget bill to Congress on Tuesday, which includes a forecast of a primary fiscal deficit of 4.5% of GDP, which will in part be financed by transfers from the central bank.
“We hope that financing from the central bank will go down, although it will not be able to be fully dispensed with for a while. That’s why we seek to normalize public finances, reduce financing needs on the part of the central bank, and lower inflation, which is a central objective,” Guzman explained.
The minister gave no clarification on next year’s forecasts for economic growth or inflation, which stood at 42.4% per annum in July.
Regarding the dollar price, Guzman argued that it points “to a stable real exchange rate in the period from December 10, 2019 to December 31, 2021, which moves hand in hand with inflation.”
