The interbank dollar advanced slightly this Thursday in the local exchange market, after the last operation was agreed on Wednesday below $43. On the day, the greenback advanced 0.10% and stood at $43,057 in the wholesale average. Meanwhile, the last operation was agreed at $ 43.11 with a rise of 0.40% compared to yesterday. Anyway, in the accumulated of the year, the dollar is 3.6% below the close of last year.
Thus, the decision made by the Central Bank (BCU) after the meeting of the Monetary Policy Committee (Copom) to raise the interest rate by 75 basis points, to 7.25%, had no major impact on the price of the US currency. Some analysts believe that the policy of raising rates that the monetary authority has promoted since August of last year weakens the trajectory of the dollar.
It was a day with operations for a total of US$ 15.4 million and, as in recent weeks, the Central Bank stayed out of the market without intervention.
The president of the BCU, Diego Labat, reiterated this Thursday that the monetary authority has intervened when the dollar “it goes out of its fundamentals or in some specific episode”, but that the best way, from his point of view, is “try to let the dollar float as much as possible”, as he told the program In perspective of Radiomundo.
He added that the fall of the dollar is passing “throughout the region” as the flip side of the appreciation of raw materials and “when these things happen that are natural, no intervention is necessary.”
Last week a delegation from the Union of Exporters (UEU) transmitted to the authorities of the Central Bank of Uruguay his concern about the trajectory of the greenback in the future. The tourism sector has also expressed concern about the current price of the dollar, at a time when it is seeking to recover from the shock caused by the pandemic.
In that sense, the President of the Republic Luis Lacalle Pou was consulted by the press this Wednesday due to the downward path of the exchange rate and did not hide his concern. “There are movements of the currency at a global level that affect us; some measures can be taken,” said the president, without going into more detail about what type of actions the government could take. Lacalle Pou warned that the exchange rate accumulates a significant drop in the number of days. “We hope that the currency will change, especially for those two sectors (exports and tourism), for which “a dollar with a different price is so important,” he declared.
On the board of Banco República (BROU), the currency was offered at $41.6 for purchase and $44.2 for sale.
At a regional level, in Brazil the dollar gained 0.79% and was trading at 5.17 reais per unit, according to data from Bloomberg. In Chile, the exchange rate ended Thursday’s session with a decline of almost 4 pesos compared to yesterday’s close and stood at $795.6 pesos at the close of the day.
Globally, the Dollar Index, which measures the value of the US dollar against a basket of major currencies, rose 0.1% to 95.8 points.
