Walter Bayly
Chief Operating Officer
Sure. There are lot of different and contradicting signals in the market, and actually, the central bank yesterday announced a quite surprising, or it caught all the analysts by surprise, a reduction in our reference rate, and there are two readings we can obtain from that. One is that, we obviously feel comfortable with the inflation, and that is clearly a forward-looking view, because we are, as of today, not yet within the targets set by the Central Bank. So it means that, going forward, the Central Bank expects inflation to rather quickly, forwarding the target, and rather quickly, I would imagine, [SG&A] has to be less than six months, probably around three months. But the other reading into this, is that they feel that the economy needs some stimulus. So what I am -- going back to answering the question, we have seen a lot of contradicting signals. We see growth in the electricity consumption, very important growth, but again, a slowdown in the sales of [cement] sales. So there are portions in the portfolio that are growing, we have mentioned the corporate portfolio has grown a lot. But again, possibly -- a portion of that can be attributed to a desire of the borrowers to borrow in local currency rather than in dollars, so they have been borrowing local currency through the domestic banks, obviously ourselves, and paying dollar loans with ourselves, and a lot with non-domiciled banks. So we have also seen some growth in medium term lending, related to projects, but also projects that were initiated three, six, or maybe a year ago. On the retail side, we have seen some dynamics clearly less aggressive than we have seen in the past. But there is also the fact that ourselves, we are being more cautious and we have raised our lending standards. So there are a lot of contradictory readings of what the macroeconomic scenarios is going to be going forward. We are seeing some mixed signals. But if I were to boil them down into numbers, I would say that I expect the portfolio of the banks, of the banking system and ourselves to grow at a rate of about 15% year-over-year, and that will be the average of may be 18%, 19% on the retail side, and 12%, 13% on the corporate side. Clearly a very strong bias of growth to our local currency lending rather than dollars. Sorry that was a long answer to a short question.