The new regulation from the Central Bank requires banks to warn those who open a dollar account that their money is exposed to "exchange rate risk." The text that depositors must read is almost innocently clear: although the amount of dollars may not change, its equivalent in pesos can rise or fall according to fluctuations in the exchange rate.
At first glance, it seems like a measure of transparency. In reality, it is a small monument to deliberate confusion.
Because the risk is not in the dollar. The risk is in the peso. And the peso does not devalue by chance or by mysterious market forces. It devalues because those who control its issuance have decided, time and again, to finance with new currency what they do not dare to finance with taxes or outright debt. The dollar is not a dangerous speculation: it is the refuge people turn to when they distrust the currency that the State forces them to use.
Notice the irony. The same authority that has deteriorated the purchasing power of the local currency for years now presents itself as the protector of the citizen, warning them against the consequences of its own policy. It’s as if the fire were warning the neighbors about the danger of using fire extinguishers.
Savings in foreign currency are not a whim of speculators. They are the rational response of those who have learned, through experience, that the promise of stability of the national currency is often the most fragile of all. When a society begins to spontaneously dollarize its savings, it is not committing an economic sin: it is issuing a judgment on the quality of its currency and, by extension, on the seriousness of those who manage it.
The regulation, at its core, does not protect the depositor from exchange rate risk. It protects the fiction that the peso and the dollar are two symmetrical options, two equivalent currencies between which one chooses according to their preference. They are not. One is subject to the discretionary will of those who can produce it in unlimited quantities. The other is not.
And as long as that fundamental difference is not recognized, all the warnings in the world will be nothing more than an elegant exercise in distraction.
