The free-fall of Argentina's troubled peso showed no signs of slowing down on Tuesday, with the local currency surpassing the psychological barrier of 1,000 pesos per U.S. dollar less than two weeks before a crucial election.
The peso weakened to a historic low of 1,050 pesos per dollar in the informal parallel market on Tuesday, traders said, with a jarring 200% gap between it and the value of the tightly controlled official exchange rate, currently set at 350 pesos per greenback.
Argentine voters will head to polls on Oct. 22 to choose among three main contenders to succeed outgoing leftist President Alberto Fernandez, with radical libertarian Javier Milei seen as the front-runner due to his shock first-place showing in the August primary.
Milei, who seeks to shutter the central bank and dollarize the economy to tame triple-digit inflation, recently recommended that depositors avoid renewing bank holdings in pesos, arguing that the peso does not even serve as "excrement."
Since the primary vote, the currency has shed 44% of its value.
"Everything is working against the peso because basically nobody wants to deal with them," a capital bank manager with business in Argentina said on condition on anonymity.
"So it doesn't matter what you pay for a dollar, the objective is to dollarize before the elections and wait to see who becomes president."
Analyst Salvador Vitelli pointed out that the current inflation-adjusted value of the peso on the informal market is at its weakest point in three decades, with the exception of October 2020 when the currency briefly fell to 1,128 per dollar.
