Argentina's zombie mortgage market is coming back to life

Hernan Nessi

Mon, Apr 7, 2025, 3:07 AM 1 min read

By Hernan Nessi

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - Argentina's owe market, for years astir non-existent owed to spiraling triple-digit ostentation and precocious borrowing costs, is starting to amusement signs of coming backmost to beingness nether the pro-market reforms of libertarian President Javier Milei.

Monthly caller mortgages successful Buenos Aires province, location to 40% of the country's population, deed the highest level since 2018 astatine the commencement of the year, information from the section assemblage of notaries show. Numbers were up astir 500% successful February year-on-year.

Milei, a bombastic economist who took bureau successful precocious 2023, has shaken up the state with pugnacious austerity and cost-cutting, which has helped bring down inflation, overturn a heavy fiscal deficit, and boost assurance among investors and banks.

"The conditions needed person been acceptable up for the fiscal strategy to connection mortgages, with an archetypal propulsion from nationalist banks and past backstage banks," said Guillermo Longhi, president of the Buenos Aires state notaries body.

The wide owe indebtedness market, portion inactive tiny owed to the country's years of precocious ostentation and currency intervention, has tripled successful size to the equivalent of astir $2.3 billion, cardinal slope information shows, inactive good disconnected a highest of $8.3 cardinal successful 2018.

Longhi said the authorities needed to guarantee fiscal stability, support bringing ostentation down and boost assurance successful speech complaint policy, presently tightly controlled.

"The aboriginal of owe lending volition beryllium conditioned chiefly by the improvement of cardinal macroeconomic variables, specified arsenic inflation, the speech rate, and wide economical stability," Longhi added.

(Reporting by Hernan Nessi; Editing by Adam Jourdan and Alison Williams)