The green dreams (dollars) of Argentines

• Devaluation: Argentines queue again for their savings: the normality of the abnormal

If dreams had colors, that of Argentines would be green. But not green hope, but logical green, survival green, saving green. Green dollar . In a country that has 70 years of inflation, except for brief periods of sanity, in a country where the current government celebrated before the mega-devaluation that was about to leave the level of two percent inflation ... monthly, save In dollars it is no exoticism, it is pure reason.

Argentines do not understand, when traveling to neighboring countries such as Brazil or Chile, that they do not accept dollars when paying for a product. "I dream of being paid for the dollar menu!" Says Ramón, who is in charge of a small grill in Villa Crespo, a middle-class neighborhood in Buenos Aires.

Those Argentines who arrive in Bolivia also do not understand that the dollar is worth the same there whether it is bought or sold. And what is the business? They ask. Saving in national currency, they could respond from a country - historically the second poorest in America - in which its president, Evo Morales, comes from puncturing Argentine pride. And that, it is known, is to puncture something very, very big. " We don't want what happens to our Argentine brothers to happen to us. We have relatives who are returning massively," Morales said, in the middle of an election campaign for re-election.

It is clear: the dollar is the essential value of the Argentine economy, everyone looks at it when it comes to forming prices, a link that is not always justified , because there are products that do not have a gram of imported inputs and are not exported massively. But no matter: everyone wants to treasure dollars and be safe from the next storm , that is enough explanation for the automatic relationship between devaluation and high inflation, an almost exclusively Argentine phenomenon.

Clarification: when you say "all" is not all. A large swath of the Argentine population, around a third of the country, lives in poverty, survives . Their dreams are not exactly green, if they do not reach the weights they earn, much less can they think of saving. Not to mention doing it in dollars.

But for sectors of the country that do dream of dollars, it is important to have the antennae active before the slightest movement. The Macri administration designed a program that involves, in the final rales of its government, controlling the green passion of the Argentines. "It is a capital control," says the new finance minister, Hernán Lacunza. One of the measures states that residents in the country cannot buy more than $ 10,000 per month.

Save in dollars

"And who can buy more than 10,000 dollars per month today?" Raúl (fictitious name), owner of a "cave" in which the dollar is changed to the price "blue", name derived from a successful operation, tells EL MUNDO Marketing: before there was talk of "black market" , now it is blue. Or sad, depending on which meaning of "blue" is preferred.

What Raúl says is true: for 95 percent of Argentines accustomed to saving in dollars, the limit of 10,000 per month does not imply any problem, because it is impossible for them to reach that figure . The explosion of value of the "blue" predicted on Monday by a former Deputy Minister of Economy of Cristina Kirchner did not occur; It is, at most, 10 percent above the official value.

The government's obsession was to guarantee the population, especially the middle class, that it will have dollars and will not be controlled . Offer the greatest possible contrast with previous crises. It is observed in a service that the newspaper La Nación offers its readers: a whatsapp chat to solve doubts about the dollar: "We talked to the Central Bank and they told us everything". A reader asks: If I want to get the bills from my dollar account, can I? "There is no restriction," replies the chat.

And a devaluation, not to be forgotten, is always a great business for those who can anticipate it . Big fortunes and big investors, although, on a smaller scale, it also happened to Leandro, 30, he had saved dollars and wanted to go on vacation to Australia yes or yes this January. He bought the ticket in pesos before the primary of August 11, betting on the devaluation. He did not imagine that his bet would work out so well: what cost him $ 2,000 before the election ended up being 1,500. The same pesos, but 25 percent less in dollars . There is little in the country of the most expensive air tickets in the world.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• Argentina
• economy
• America

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