Crisis del 2001

Argentina Offers Peso Bonds Due in 2015 for Boden 2014 Notes

By Drew Benson

Last Updated: September 2, 2009 08:02 EDT

Sept. 2 (Bloomberg) -- Argentina is offering peso bonds that pay 300 basis points above the central bank’s Badlar rate for peso notes linked to inflation due in 2014 in its latest swap, the government said.

Economy Minister Amado Boudou said last night that the new exchange, aimed at replacing inflation-linked debt, will open today. Details, including specifics about so-called guaranteed loans also involved in the exchange, were published in today’s official gazette.

Argentina is already offering this week to buy back about 8.3 billion pesos ($2.16 billion) of shorter-term debt linked to inflation in exchange for securities due in 2014 that pay 2.75 percentage points above the central bank’s Badlar interbank rate.

To contact the reporter on this story: Drew Benson in Buenos Aires at abenson9@bloomberg.net

BUENOS AIRES (Dow Jones)--Argentina will issue a new sovereign bond due 2015 in exchange for some outstanding bonds linked to inflation, the official gazette said Wednesday.

EPTEMBER 2, 2009, 9:04 A.M. ET

The new Bonar bond will pay a spread of 3.00 percentage points over the Badlar rate, based on the 30-day moving average of private banks' certificate of deposit rates, according to the gazette.

The new bonds will be issued in exchange for Boden 2014 bonds, as well as some so-called guaranteed loans not included in previous liability management operations.

This operation is entirely separate from an ongoing swap which began Friday, in which the government is offering to swap about 8.3 billion Argentine pesos ($2.1 billion) from two sets of bonds, the Pre-9 bonds due March 2014 and the PR-12 bonds due January 2016, as well as other types of guaranteed loans.

In that ongoing swap, the government is offering in exchange Bonar 2014 bonds that were issued earlier this year as part of a previous debt swap. They pay a spread of 2.75 percentage points over Badlar.

The government's main aim is to reduce payments on bonds over the next two years, which, according to the government's latest debt report, total about $13.23 billion in 2010 and $12.54 billion in 2011.

There is also the hope that this swap would reduce some of the pressure on the widely discredited statistics agency, Indec. Many private-sector economists claim inflation and other data are manipulated by the government, which denies the charges.

-By Matthew Cowley, Dow Jones Newswires; +54 11 4103 6740; matthew.cowley@dowjones.com