LatinNews Daily - 15 June 2023

* Colombia’s finance ministry has presented its medium-term fiscal framework, which will serve as its financial plan for 2023 as it aims to advance with its socioeconomic reform agenda. Presenting the plan, Finance Minister Ricardo Bonilla said that “the high economic growth of 2022, which enabled significant advances regarding unemployment and multidimensional poverty, will slow throughout 2023 and 2024 before settling at a medium-term level of over 3%”. The fiscal document predicts that growth in 2023 will be 1.8%, compared with growth of 7.3% in 2022, due to global economic headwinds increasing reduced dynamism among trading partners, a lower price of oil, and high interest rates. However, it also predicts that the fiscal deficit will fall to 4.3% of GDP in 2023, down from 5.3% at the end of 2022. Against this gloomy economic background, the government yesterday increased its target for bond auctions this year according to reporters cited by Bloomberg; the finance ministry’s public credit director, José Roberto Acosta, reportedly said that the government plans to auction Col$34trn (US$8.1bn) of domestic treasury bonds (TES) this year, up from a previous forecast of Col$27trn, and that it plans to sell a further Col$37trn of the TES in 2024, according to the Bloomberg report.