The Sustainability Guarantee Fund (FGS), which supports the pension system, grew 22.9% annually in dollars during 2021reaching US $ 51,149 million, and, in this way, it was located at its highest value since 2017, according to a National Social Security Administration report (Anse).
The FGS portfolio valued in dollars totaled US$51,143 million at the end of December 2021, which meant an increase of 22.9% year-on-year and 47% when compared to November 2019.
“When we took over the organization, the fund was at US$34.8 billion and the latest data shows a strong valuation of 47% in dollars,” The general secretary of Anses, Santiago Fraschina, told Télam.
“This is an important piece of information because they said that we took care of retirees’ money in a bad way and in two years we were able to value it strongly,” the official asserted.
After a peak of US$64,055 million at the end of 2017, the Fund’s portfolio registered a sharp drop in 2018 and 2019 of 31.9% and 8.5%, respectively.
In addition to being a leverage instrument for the local economy, the FGS allows Anses to be financed in cases where there are short-term deficits in the public pension system in order to preserve the amount of benefits.
The Sustainability Guarantee Fund
The FGS is composed for financial assets such as public securities, stocks of corporations, time deposits, negotiable obligations and mutual funds, in addition to financing for infrastructure works, a destination whose composition of the total FGS increased in 2021 for the first time since 2015.
The 73.1% ($3.84 trillion) of the portfolio is invested in national public securitiesof which 60.2% is distributed in non-guaranteed negotiable securities, 12.3% in quasi-par bonds, and 0.6% in guaranteed negotiable securities.
The great The majority of public securities (75.5%) are invested in pesos and are adjusted mainly by CER (inflation).
Second, there is the portfolio of shares on the Anses Stock Exchange whose value stood at $578,500 million, which represented an increase of 70.9% per year, a return above the average of the S&P Merval, which was 63% in the same period.
The portfolio on the Anses Stock Exchange, which represents a total of 11% of the FGS, is led by investments in steel companies (30%), banks (22%), energy companies (22%) and telecommunications companies (10%). with shareholdings in Ternium (25.6%), Banco Macro (9.3%), Grupo Financiero Galicia (9.2%), Pampa Energía (8.9%) and Telecom (8.7%).
On the other hand, in third place are the investments in securities issued by state and provincial entitiesincluding Central Bank bills and provincial bank securities, which amounted to $283,000 million.
A significant amount of the FGS ($ 231,000 million) was directed towards ANSES credits, of which 69.5% was allocated to beneficiaries of the pension system and the rest (30.5%) to beneficiaries outside the system, including loans to pensioners due to disability or to beneficiaries of the Universal Child Allowance (AUH) and Family Child Allowance (SUAF).
Other important point of the composition of the FGS is the contribution to productive and infrastructure projectswith positive effects on the local economy.
The funds that grew by 113.4% in the fourth quarter of 2021 compared to the same period of 2020represent a 3% share of the total FGS, almost double that at the end of 2021.
According to Anses data, the infrastructure investments they represented 12.9% of the total FGS portfolio as of December 2015, but then fell steadily to 3.7% in December 2019, reaching lows of around 2% at the end of 2020.
The oil and gas projects (55.3%), the financing of Procrear (20.9%), the energy works (9.8%) and the completion of the Atucha II atomic plant (4.4%), were the main destinations of the funds.
One of the latest projects to receive financing from the FGS is the construction of the Sierras de Ullum Photovoltaic Solar Plant in the province of San Juan, which will initially have a nominal power of 78 megawatts.
As for the mutual fund stock (FCI), it totaled $59,117 million at the end of 2021, most of which was invested in funds allocated to infrastructure (35%) and SMEs (35%).
Meanwhile, investments in corporate bonds totaled $51,068 million, with the majority of them (61.7%) located in the oil and gas sector, and, to a lesser extent, energy (14%) and electricity (7%). ).
For his part, the stock of time deposit placements totaled $48,216 million (0.9% of the FGS), of which the majority was invested in pre-cancelable deposits (42%), fixed-rate returns on normal deposits (31%) and bond yields (1%).
