Luis Caputo assured that inflation in May will be below 5%

The Minister of Economy, Luis Caputo, predicted that inflation in May, which will be released this Thursday by the National Institute of Statistics and Census (INDEC), will be below 5% and promised a sharp reduction in the PAIS Tax if the Bases Law is approved, which this week will be debated in the Chamber of Senators. We believe that it will be below 5%,” said the head of the Ministry of Finance during an interview with Luis Majul on LN+ on Sunday. “Remember that not much more than two months ago you asked me if inflation was going to reach single digits in the second half of the year. Well, it hit single digits in April. Then they said ‘it can’t go below seven’, and it’s below five,” the official said. In the event that INDEC ratifies the official projections, inflation will reach its lowest level since November 2022, when it stood at 4.9%. Since then, it has never managed to drill 5% again. However, different analysts, including those consulted by the Central Bank in the latest Market Expectations Survey (REM), believe that the decline in prices will stagnate in the coming months around 5%. Lower PAIS TaxIn another part of the report, Caputo promised a 10-point reduction in the PAIS Tax if Congress finally approves the Law of Bases. It is much better that the Bases Law passes, it is better for Argentines. I always suspected that they were not going to pass it, so I put together an economic program to combat this and I also said at the time that I was raising the PAIS tax to combat this. I also said that it was going to be short-term. And they said ‘he is not going to fall in love, once in Argentina they put a tax, they do not take it out anymore,'” the minister recalled. “The President has already announced it: if they approve the law, we are going to roll back that tax increase, from 17.5% to 7.5%,” he said, while maintaining that this measure “will strongly lower the Argentine cost” and will be “a new step down the level of inflation.” Against the oppositionReferring to the Bases Law, the Minister of Economy said that the opposition does not vote for it “because it knows that the law is good.” Along these lines, he asserted that the opposition – “not all, but the one we already know,” he clarified – “today is with only one objective, which is to try to overturn the government.” At the same time, he pointed out that “for a good sector of politics, politics is a business. It has nothing to do with the public vocation, it does not care about the people. They are militants and they are there to make money, and it is a business of billions of dollars.”

Original source in Spanish