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Wall St Has Its Doubts Over Brazil's Intervention Plan By:
Grainne
Mc Carthy
New York -- According to conventional wisdom in the
foreign exchange market, intervention by central banks to manipulate their
currencies works best if it's totally unexpected, if speculators have
extreme bets on against the currency and if the intervention nudges the
currency in the direction the market wants to go anyway. On the face of it, the Brazilian central bank's plan
announced Wednesday - under which it will spend up to $1.5 billion
intervening in the currency market every day in July - meets none of those
criteria. That's not to say it won't be successful in stabilizing the
sliding real, which has lost more than 20% of its value since mid-April. In fact it's already yielded some element of success,
hauling the real back from another all-time low earlier Wednesday around
BRL2.940 and arguably injecting an element of doubt into the theory that
the real was on a one-way slide. But if the aim of the intervention strategy is to
really turn the Brazilian real around, it probably will have less lasting
effect, U.S.-based analysts said. This is partly due to the fact that Brazilian markets
are still dominated by October's presidential elections, with the
opposition Worker's Party candidate Lula de Silva continuing to lead the
government and market-friendly candidate Jose Serra. Brazilian assets are
also under pressure from concerns over Latin America's largest economy's
public debt load, which has nearly doubled in recent years to around 56%
of gross domestic product. Against these political and economic pressures,
the central bank's efforts, no matter how well-considered, can only do so
much. But analysts also argue that the central bank might
be stymied by its own transparency. In forewarning currency markets of its
strategy, the central bank effectively lost the element of surprise that's
key to any intervention policy. "The fact that they are going to do
this was a surprise," said Guillermo Estebanez, a currency analyst at
Bank of America in San Francisco. "But once it's factored in, it's
not a surprise anymore, it becomes a non-issue." Ammunition For Speculators At the same time, the central bank has potentially
handed speculators an ideal opportunity to make money at their expense:
"If you still think the real's rate will get worse, you would take
the opportunity to buy dollars on the cheap and sell them back to the
central bank," said Estebanez. Even so, the threat from speculators is diminished by
the fact that, since early 1999, the real has been floating freely. Hedge
funds have had a much easier job in the past of attacking an overvalued
pegged currency, which makes a clear target. And yet, speculators may be of less relevance in this
case because they aren't believed to be big participants in the real
market these days, a situation which in fact exposes some flaws in the new
policy. "One of the things that increases the likelihood
of success is if speculators are very short your currency," said
Estebanez. But this isn't really the case in Brazil , where pressure on
the real has resulted more from local companies hedging their
dollar-denominated debt. "In that sense, intervention has less of an
impact which ultimately brings you to the question of how effective this
is going to be to stop the weakening of the real. I don't think this is
going to do it," he said. In some ways, determining whether the intervention
plan will work is somewhat in the eye of the beholder in any case. While
the weakening of the real has certainly been dramatic over recent weeks,
there's still the question of how much weaker it might be now if the
central bank wasn't using a variety of monetary tools to prop it up? The monetary authorities have been shortening bond
maturities in a bid to ease fears among investors about holding
longer-dated debt heading into the October elections, even though this
raises further concerns about Brazil's reliance on short-term debt. In
addition, the monetary authorities have been intervening during periods of
strong pressure on the currency. They have also raised the reserve
requirement for bank time deposits to 15-20% from 10-15% previously, in a
bid to reduce real liquidity and help support the currency. In this context, Wednesday's announcement simply adds
another element to that cocktail. There's also some precedent in Brazil
for the policy: almost exactly a year ago, the central bank began
implementing a similar policy, spending roughly $50 million a day on the
spot market to lift the real. That did reap some measure of success in
helping to stabilize the real. It's All About Politics What's more, analysts argue that central banks around
the world increasingly use such transparent tools to communicate with the
market, as the days of large-scale surprise interventions favored during
the 1980s and some of the 1990s fades away, with the exception of at the
Bank of Japan. "What is positive is that it gives the market a clear
sense of what the central bank is doing and how proactive it will be in
preserving the value of the real," said Jose Barrionuevo, head of
emerging market strategy at Barclay's Bank in New York. "In that
sense it's a positive shot to confidence." But there are some key reasons why Brazil's current
situation could render the intervention plan less likely to work now. For
one, the global economic environment is much more uncertain than it was a
year ago and the sheer scale of Brazil's debt - gross public debt is
estimated at around $275 billion - renders the country extremely
vulnerable to shocks. On the plus side, Brazil's current account deficit
fell to 3.7% of GDP in the year to May, the lowest in a 12-month period
since September 1996. Unlike its neighbor Argentina, which was in
recession for years before its debt default, Brazil has posted positive
GDP growth on a regular basis and has also weathered the Argentina crisis
relatively well. But with the presidential race set to remain a major factor on investors' minds - as well as questions about how Brazil can continue to finance its debt - many analysts continue to believe it's only a matter of time before the dollar breaches the BRL3.0 level. "We haven't seen the nadir of the crisis yet," said Marc Chandler, chief currency strategist at HSBC in New York. FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Action on Aging distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
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