Sergio Massa ratified that “the objective of lowering inflation did not change”

Economy Minister Sergio Massa remarked that “the objective of halving the inflation we receive did not change,” and stressed that the agreement with the International Monetary Fund is “achievable.” The most difficult thing is to manage expectations, especially because I had to assume a political and economic crisis: 7.4 inflation, negative reserves, with a huge deterioration in the trade balance; and also with absolutely uncomfortable relative prices,” he explained in an interview with CNN en Español on Saturday night. The important reference of the Government pointed out that “the need to respond, to use the times well so that these answers are forceful and not magical, sometimes clashes with the expectation, with the desire of the markets, of the workers to recover income, of society to live with a much more logical inflation and not with the one we have to live with today. ” “The first challenging constraint we have for the next 12 months is to imagine how we find a point in which we are attractive for everything that is the Argentine agro-export sector, because that weighs us on reserves; because Argentina needs to accumulate reserves, but also how we use them to sustain the level of activity,” he added. In addition, he raised the need to understand that “it is important that each Argentine SME, that each Argentine company that produces goods has the dollars to increase the supply of goods because, in short, part of the inflationary problem has to do with two and a half years without access to credit, financing us with issuance, with 6 points of deficit only leveraged in the assistance of the Treasury “. It was necessary to sustain companies, it was necessary to sustain the income of people who were in informality and had to pay their minimum bills at the end of the month; And well, all that is like at home: if you finance yourself with the card and you have no income and do not generate income with work, there is a time when the item of interest on the card becomes a difficult mountain to absorb and it is time to stop the ball, to put order, to work seriously,” he said, recalling the pandemic. He also referred to the multiple exchange rates and explained that “Argentina has to move towards simplifying that process, trying to balance the piles of entry and exit of what are production goods, consumer goods, and trying to balance the piles of what are the output of luxury or products that already have prices in some way dollarized.” Faced with this situation, he did not lose hope and maintained that “the objective of halving the inflation we received, which is a bit the initial message we gave, did not change. Nor at the time we planned did we think we were going to have a drought that (…) changes everything.” Finally, he referred to the debt in pesos and detailed: “It is absolutely sustainable and will also be clear and demonstrated in the coming days. Not only is it not priceless, but after the second quarter, the next government will have a profile and a curve for the 24th and 25th much better than the one that touched this government when it started in terms of product. ” In another order, he said that “the debt in pesos is absolutely sustainable and will also be clear and demonstrated in the coming days, when we finish closing the second quarter, which is the only one of this year that remains, let’s say, a strong component not intra State, but a strong component of participation of the banks, of mutual funds and insurance companies.” The question has to be how we multiply the generation of dollars from the four advantages that Argentina has for the coming years. And that has to be the underlying discussion of Argentina and no bad result in a match is going to get me out of the fight in the championship to lower inflation, “he concluded.

Original source in Spanish