The banks came out en masse to reject the tax that the government of the province of Buenos Aires will charge them for income obtained from the purchase and sale of bonds of the national treasury. They assure that this will be transferred to users with higher interest rates.
This week it was learned that the province that governs Axel Kicillof may charge a 9% as a rate of Gross Income for banks that register profits from having invested in public securities issued by the national Ministry of Economy. Debt placed by provinces or municipalities was left out of the measure.
This tax increase was included in the tax bill for 2026 that the Buenos Aires Executive sends to the provincial parliament every year for approval along with the Budget. Specifically, the initiative removed commercial banks from exemptions current Gross Income regulations for those who make purchases and sales of national bonds.
The banks cried out because, they say, in addition to implying an additional unforeseen tax cost (“scare away investments”summarized in an international capital entity), will have a direct effect on the cost that people or companies pay to take out credit.
“In practice, it introduces an additional cost on transactions that were not traditionally covered by this tax,” they explained from a leading bank. The additional tax burden will affect, they describe, a common operation for any bank: the management of their liquidity, that is, the amount of pesos they have. It is something that depends on how many deposits and loans they grant, and is calibrated on a daily basis.
“This forces us to recalculate the economic convenience of operations that are key to managing liquidity and risk” such as the purchase and sale of national Treasury bonds, they mentioned. This happens because part of the lace -the portion of pesos that banks must keep immobilized without lending by regulation of the Central Bank- can be “computed” with public securities issued by Economía.
Thus, if compliance with the minimum fixed cash requirement implies a more onerous operation, the banks’ entire operating cost will be affected. “Sooner or later it will affect the client’s interest rate cost.”“, they commented from another private commercial entity. That diagnosis was shared by the rest of the banks and the chambers that bring them together.
“Gross Income taxes on financial activity increase the cost of credit to the private sector. The provincial states and the City of Buenos Aires should lower these taxes to promote economic growth and employment; raising them would go in the opposite direction,” he told Clarín Javier Bolzicopresident of the Association of Argentine Banks (Adeba), the national capital entities.
For its part, Claudio Cesarior, head of the Association of Banks of Argentina (ABA), those of foreign origin, added: “These types of measures are extremely badfor banks because it complicates the management of their different portfolios and decision making, but they are much worse for people because with the current tax burden, a person who takes out a loan and pays a fee of $100 has to know that approximately $51 of that total corresponds to national, provincial and municipal taxes.
The particularity that it is a tax determined by a province does not imply that it only affects banks that have Buenos Aires tax domicile, nor that the increases in interest rates on loans only affect clients who reside in that province.
The impact, they assert, will be transversal. “All banks that operate in the Province of Buenos Aires will owe the tax, depending on What percentage of your activity is located in the province?“said another banker. “Due to the technical form of distribution of the tax, they are going to be affected citizens from anywhere in the country instead of only affecting the province,” they concluded from another entity.
From the province of Buenos Aires they did not make comments at the closing of this note regarding the consultation of Clarion about why next year’s tax law included the removal of banks from the list of exemptions for Gross Receipts for national bond transactions. For its implementation from next January 1, a decree from the Buenos Aires Executive Branch remains.
The issue of interest rates is recurring in a context of increasingly pronounced delays in credit and card payments. According to the Central Bank, until October the average personal loan rates were close to 84% nominal, which implies an effective annual rate of almost 125%. That month, the expected inflation for the following twelve months was 20.8% according to the Market Expectations Survey (REM).