Borrowing in dollars versus quetzales: cost and risk
- Local and multilateral financing
- Where the credit comes from
- Audited
Corporate credit in dollars is appreciably cheaper than in quetzales: in the BVN's July 2025 auctions, US$ commercial paper from non-bank issuers (PARRENDA, PLAFISE, PARRENDLEASE, PTCUSCATLAN) cleared at 5.50-7.50% against 7.00-8.33% in GTQ, while a blue-chip bank placed PBICREDIT paper in quetzales at 4.00-4.75% for one year and the system's average lending rate runs at around 12.9%. Borrowing in dollars against quetzal revenue is a currency bet, historically mitigated by the narrow Q7.3-8.2 per dollar band (see dossier 10), but a bet all the same. The dossier's rule of thumb: debt in US$ if there is dollar revenue (exporter, free zone); in GTQ if not.
The research is written in English; quoted figures, source names and the titles of legal instruments stay in the language their source published them in.
Figures
- US$ commercial paper from non-bank issuers
- 5.50-7.50%
- GTQ commercial paper from non-bank issuers
- 7.00-8.33%
- PBICREDIT paper (GTQ, 1 year)
- 4.00-4.75%
- Historic exchange-rate band
- Q7.3-8.2 per US$
Caveat
Sources
Related records
This layer is research: read from public sources by the archive's own team, every claim cited with the date it was consulted, and audited where it is marked so. It has not entered the verified store — no figure here was fetched back from its source or stamped with a retrieval time — so it wears no red provenance numeral and never mixes with the verified figures.