Argentina’s New Central Bank President Seeks to Calm Markets

February 4, 2010

by AQ Online

In her first public comments, Mercedes Marcó del Pont, the new president of the Central Bank of Argentina, promised today that she would bring about “reasonable” policy changes and that she was “thinking of maintaining the monetary and exchange rate policy with regards to the type of competitive managed float.”

Marco del Pont, a Yale graduate and most recently president of Banco de la Nación Argentina, takes over from Martín Redrado who resigned last Friday, weeks after President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner issued an emergency decree removing him from office over a dispute of the government’s use of Central Bank Reserves. On Tuesday, a non-binding bicameral commission voted for his removal.

President Fernández de Kirchner admitted yesterday during a press conference that the conflict caused by the removal of Redrado generated an institutional crisis, although she maintained that the fault was that of the opposition. “There is an excessive ritualism used by some to obstruct rather than collaborate,” she said. The opposition had harshly criticized the president’s decision to remove Redrado from the Central Bank without approval from Congress.

Economist Aldo Abram says that although the conflict has been solved, it wasn’t done so through the appropriate institutional path. “In Argentina, the executive branch thinks it’s above other institutions, which are seen as mere ‘ritualism’,” he says. The Argentine peso weakened against the dollar in interbank trading today.

Tags:: Argentina, Central Bank of Argentina

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