The private sector with the capacity to pressure government and state policies found its way in the López Obrador government and wants to extend it in the Administration of Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo: an economic model of neoliberal populism, a mixture of social programs, but with strict compliance with the IMF’s inflationary restrictions.
The speculative pressures of Monday and Tuesday on the Stock Exchange and the peso were a small accompaniment of the power of the money men to bend the politicians’ margins of action. Lopez Obrador, Sheinbaum and Brunette achieved an electoral victory almost with a qualified legislative majority to modify the Constitution in Congress and in the face of this reality the response capacity of the private sector dominant of foreign investment to put a limit on the possibilities of the power structure reforms announced already in advance of the elections by the ruling bloc.
In this context, the arrival in August 2021 at the Secretary of Finance of the economist advisor to powerful foreign consortiums, Rogelio Ramírez de la O. The arrival of the economist graduated from the conservative University of Cambridge, England, was after the setback of Brunette in the intermediate legislative elections and the restrictions on legislative reforms to put order in the populism strategy.
The victorious euphoria of the morenistas for the 2024-2030 six-year term, the margins of maneuver are very clear: with the pulse of a surgeon, the President López Obrador implemented in his six-year term a populist economic model with very wide margins of social investment, but he made very clear his respect for the conditionalities of the International Monetary Fund so that social spending and economic growth in favor of the popular classes were not done with the old inflationary instruments of Echeverrista-Lopezportillista populism: increase of public spending without fiscal balance, budget deficit greater than 4% (it reached 16%), strict control over the money printing machine so as not to use artificial spending, rethinking of a very open social policy to only very specific programs that now respond to budgetary restrictions and reallocation of spending from some social sectors to the new six-year priorities so as not to increase the money in circulation.
This model received euphoric approval from the IMF in the annual reviews of the Letters of Intent of economic policy where the Treasury authorities committed themselves primarily to controlling circulation and in fact reduced social programs in one sector to benefit another that It would have greater electoral profitability, as was seen in the elections of June 2.
The strategy was always defined by the President of the Republic, but without being understood by his two previous Treasury Secretaries: the neoliberal technocrat of Itamite origin (from ITAM, the Mexican school of neoliberalism) Carlos Urzúa, who wore himself out demanding a general cut. of social spending; and the improvised Arturo Herrera, whose bureaucratic panic at the presidential figure never allowed his Treasury Secretary to define a government strategy.
In August 2021, after the reduction of Morena’s legislative base in the federal Chamber of Deputies, Ramírez de la O arrived at the Treasury, although he was always a non-public advisor to the presidential strategy. De la O. earned a doctorate in economics from Cambridge, England, and in 1983 he published his doctoral thesis titled From improvisation to failure as a book. The foreign investment policy in Mexico (Ocean publishing house and Centro de Ecodesarrollo) and concluded there that foreign investment was important for the country, but it included all the nationalist contradictions of the old PRI populism, in addition to recognizing that it was indispensable for the productive dynamics by their contributions.
Advisor to important transnational companies as a private economist from the company ECANAL, De la O brings the mixed format that public tax policies do not necessarily conflict with the IMF’s demands for macroeconomic stability. Its continued transexennial and “indefinite” presence in the Government of Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo will mean the extension of the social policy model with neoliberal macroeconomic stability of López Obrador, to avoid the business panic that broke out in 1994 from the Salinas-Zedillo conflict to Jaime’s December error. Serra Puche and which led to the collapse of 1995.
In this context, economic policy will be managed from Palenque, Chiapas.
More from the same author:
#Agenda #AMLODe #neoliberal #populism
