Only 1 in 4 is placed for a fixed term and the Government wants it to rise

According to data from the Central Bank as of last Wednesday, the latest official information available, Dollar deposits in banks reached US$37,820 million. Although this number represents a drop from the record total reached at the end of last month, when they had exceeded US$38.16 billion, this number already represents more than a quarter of the total stock of private sector deposits.

Public and private banks still pay variable rates, and relatively low in annual terms due to the placement of fixed terms in dollars. For example, the 30-day returns offered by entities They range from 0.05% per year in Santander, which pays the least, to 2.5% per year in Banco Nación (BNA).

The public entity is the one that best remunerates fixed terms for longer periods: For those made for 60 days, it offers an annual rate of 3% and 4% annually if that extends up to 180 days. In the case of placements of 365 days or more, The bank that offers the best returns is Provincia, with a TNA of 5.5%.

The Government wants to promote this type of placements. As part of the Tax Innocence package that was regulated in the last week, ARCA decided that the interest paid by this type of placements will not be counted for the calculation of Income Tax. The economic team’s bet is that this serves as an incentive to capture part of the “mattress dollars.”

The Minister of Economy Luis Caputo He assured in his X account that The stock of dollar deposits “is going to grow much more.”

Last week, when financial entities were still analyzing the application of the newly regulated Fiscal Innocence Law, Caputo and the head of the Central Bank, Santiago Bausili, led a meeting with representatives of top brokerage houses in the City. The idea is create, together with the capital market, the necessary instruments so that savers decide to pour their dollars into the formal financial system.

For now, banks do not see greater incentives to increase the “prizes” for capturing savers’ dollars, especially because, due to the macroprudential regulations that have governed Argentina since post-convertibility, entities cannot “do financial intermediation”that is, lending those deposits to families and non-exporting companies. For this reason, in recent weeks the Government once again expressed its intention to modify a decree of 2002 and then change the credit policy of the Central Bank.

One of the motivations for doing this is the sharp jump that loans in foreign currency have had since the arrival of Javier Milei to the Casa Rosada: the stock went from US$ 3,600 million at the end of 2023 to US$ 19,600 currently, according to data from the consulting firm 1816. The growth of credit in foreign currency is partly one of the reasons why the Central Bank was able to guarantee the purchase of dollars this year.