LATimes | A proposal floated by the leaders of Brazil and Argentina to launch a common currency is being met with deep skepticism by analysts, who say neither country is positioned to tackle such a complicated undertaking or instill confidence in the idea with global markets.
Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva told reporters Monday, though, that a common currency would reduce a harmful dependence on the U.S. dollar.
“I think this will happen with time, and it is necessary because there are countries that sometimes have difficulty acquiring dollars,” Lula said in Buenos Aires after meeting his Argentine counterpart, Alberto Fernández. “We must not in the 21st century continue doing the same as what was done in the 20th century.”
The currency would initially be shared between Argentina and Brazil for trade and transactions between the two countries and later be adopted by fellow members of the Mercosur trade bloc, Lula explained. Details remained fuzzy a day after Lula and Fernández announced the outlines in a joint statement published Sunday in the Argentine newspaper Perfil.
Speaking in Buenos Aires on Monday afternoon, Brazil’s Finance Minister Fernando Haddad clarified that the proposal would not entail the adoption of a sole currency to replace the Brazilian real and the Argentine peso.
Economists had immediately questioned the logic of the plan between the South American neighbors. Economic conditions are deteriorating in Argentina, where nearly four in 10 people live in poverty. The nation has one of the world’s highest inflation rates — 95% in 2022 — and its peso has been steadily depreciating for over a decade. Its multiple foreign exchange rates include an illegal one employed in backrooms by money-changers — a practice so entrenched that this so-called “blue dollar” rate is published daily in newspapers.
Brazil, Latin America’s largest nation, sits in an objectively better place economically, but it is hardly a beacon of success. Its inflation in 2022 exceeded the ceiling of the central bank’s target range for a second straight year. And the real has shed half its value against the dollar since 2014, just before the nation plunged into its deepest recession in a century. The nation’s growth prospects remain subdued, and it hasn’t recorded a primary budget surplus since 2013.
“Neither country has the initial conditions to make this succeed and attract others,” Mohamed A. El-Erian, former chief executive of Pimco, one of the world’s premier fixed-income investment managers, tweeted on Sunday. “The best this initiative can hope for is that talk creates some political cover for much-needed economic reforms.”
Fernández said neither he nor his Brazilian counterpart knows how a currency could function between their two countries or in the region. But he said they agree that depending on foreign currencies for trade is harmful. The greenback’s recent strength has complicated the repayment of dollar-denominated debt for developing nations around the world, including Argentina. Its central bank uses its precious dollar reserves to pay down its foreign debt and to intervene in the currency market to stem depreciation, and so it is loath to sell greenbacks to importers for trade.
Both countries’ economic teams will present proposals for trade and bilateral transactions, with a currency created after “much debate and meetings,” Lula said.
The proposal isn’t original, nor has it come only from the left.
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