Who would tell AMLO that there is a recession?

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Hopefully the day will not come when the economy enters the recessive terrain. But if that condition occurs, who will be the brave person within the presidential team that dares to tell Andrés Manuel López Obrador that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell into the negative terrain and that the technical conditions of a recession are met?

If in private cabinet meetings the president reacts as he does in public, for example, in the morning, he will surely raise the color of his cheeks and say that he has other data and that they are not measuring the economy well if they do not incorporate the savings that the country has for the total elimination of corruption.

If the atmosphere is tense, surely no one would dare to tell you that the business that the coordinator of the Mayan Train apparently wants to clean up the Sargasso of Quintana Roo with its inexperienced private company, is very similar to the model of corruption that was used the last sexennium.

But if in the privacy of the presidential office Lopez Obrador were receptive and accepted that, indeed, the economy would have entered the negative terrain, would plan how to transfer the responsibility of it to someone else and how to lift the boat to get it afloat.

Today, it must be said with all the letters, the Mexican economy presents an evident deceleration, but it does not have any element that anticipates the possibility of a recession.

The most worrisome of the first quarter, which had a negative reading of -0.2%, was the performance of the industrial sector, which has been showing a marked weakness for several quarters, especially due to extractive industries. But the rest of the indicators that led to GDP below zero should be corrected in the months to come to achieve at least a figure slightly above 1% this year.

However, it is also true that there may be different circumstances, internal and external, that make repeat a negative quarter. That would start the discussion of whether the economy would be in recession or not.

The economies work by cycles and eventually the conditions of low are given. The point is that the economy and its performance are more in the field of politics and a recession is synonymous with failure.

And since neoliberalism is over, as there are no neo-orthodox technocrats, López Obrador and his people could not argue that the conditions of the global environment have taken the economic cycle to the recessive side. That would sound very fifí.

That is why it was interesting that the president of the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi), Julio Santaella, remembered something that is obvious, but today it is very pertinent to remember: the Inegi is the messenger of the data, the declaration of a recession not It’s up to them

It asks, with elegance, to create a technical council that is in charge of such work, something that certainly does not need, because the analysts of any bank, national or foreign organism, university or non-governmental institution would be in charge of giving account of that declaration of the state of recession.The market does not need bureaucracy for the obvious.

The discussion would not be technical, that is resolved. The problem would be obviously political. How would it fall in 4Q, with dreams of growing up to 6% per year, that there would be a recession?

I hope, for the good of all, that the day will not come when, faced with an economic recession in Mexico, someone will have to approach Andrés Manuel López Obrador to say: “Mr. President, I have to tell you something.”

Source: el economista

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