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Banks in Argentina



My appreciated colleague Daniel Kostzer posted a message about "Argentina and the IMF" complaining about how "silently banks were inducing capital flights". Daniel´s argument is based on a report presented by Mario Cafiero, a congresman from the ARI. Unfortunately, the conclusions of the report are wrong because the misunderstood banks balance sheets: though this is not the place to develop the story in full (many answers are available, in spanish unfortunately), they made the mistake of confusing parallel reductions in asset and liabilities because of lower trading and a change in Central Bank regulations with a reduction in banks funding. More impressive is the fact that suggesting the opposite implies a huge misunderstanding on how the banks multiplier works. The conclusion about what cause the mess in the Argentine banking system continues to be: a massive withdrawal of deposits to which the policy makers reacted with liquidity restrictions. By any means I would like to suggest that banks made not mistakes -e.g., not opposing when they were forced to buy increasingly amounts of public debt appears to be one of them- but definitely not the one Daniel is mentioning (or more precisely, the Cafiero report that can be read at http://www1.hcdn.gov.ar/dependencias/ari/Principal/SUBVERSION%20ECONOMICA/Subversion.htm). I hope that the fact that I am a bank economist does not make my counter-argument less reliable: after all, what is being discussed in this very limited sense is accounting not subject to "ideological" spectacles. Best regards.


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