The debate on the GDP figures for 2021 is being biased towards the responsibility of the federal government and the concept of a technical recession due to two quarters of negative growth is being imposed. However, a broader approach reveals components different from those that outline a recession and the country is facing, as in 1973, a phase of sluggishness due to the lack of private investment.
In three years and in the face of slowdown pressures induced by the pandemic, the business sector has insisted on committing public investment in infrastructure areas to build what are known as countercyclical programs, that is, programs that go against the slowdown trend. productive.
The business sluggishness is part of a kind of negative response by private investors to the political behavior of the president of the republic; that is, what political reasons would be determining productive business decisions.
These behaviors, in addition to being political, characterize the real profile of Mexican businessmen: they are not investors who take risks in business, but are content to be mere contractors of public works for governments. Private investment indicators and Bank of Mexico surveys with investors reveal business fears and anger with the political leadership of the State.
In this sense, the slowdown in GDP has responded to the lack of a government strategy to support the productive plant and employment, but also to the political bargaining of businessmen with public decisions.
As in 1973, businessmen find themselves in open political and ideological confrontation with government decisions that are tending towards the economic reconstruction of the State, after Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s neoliberal counterrevolution diminished the dynamic role of the State in the economy and he delivered the works budgets to the business class.
Entrepreneurs have revealed in Bank of Mexico surveys that the conditions to invest do not exist. The paradox of the Mexican capitalist economic model lies in the fact that public investment is barely 15% of total investment and that the remaining 85% is held by businessmen. But despite the dominance of capital in investment, businessmen spend their time complaining about state regulations, public decisions to increase effective demand through wages, and government delays in state infrastructure works.
The typical example of the contractor and non-entrepreneur businessman is Carlos Slim Helú, who at 81 years of age rushes to calls from the National Palace to manage public works contracts for his companies, without knowing of any bold initiative that does not go through his power relations with the ruling class. Slim’s economic power was created by President Salinas de Gortari’s decision in 1991 to sell him a sufficient percentage of telephones in Mexico to have control of the company and from there start a commercial expansion.
The Mexican recession must be analyzed in the scenario of the sluggishness in business investments and the participation of the main captains of industry, commerce and banking in politics to support the configuration of a PRI-PAN-PRD-Coparmex opposition alliance , in such a way as to promote the former president of Coparmex, Gustavo de Hoyos, as the opposition presidential candidate in 2024.
The business rebellion of 1973 found in the neoliberal counterrevolution of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1980-2018) the guarantor of a production model that generated a plutocracy of businessmen who want the public budget as a source of works that benefit the contractor business class.
In these two years of productive restrictions due to the pandemic, private entrepreneurs clamor and clamor for countercyclical infrastructure programs that allow them economic activity paid for by the government and without risking their own money in non-public areas.
The lack of private investment in these two years of the pandemic has shown that we do not have a business class in Mexico, but that there are private contractors who generate their profits with public works.
Policy for dummies: politics is class struggle by other means.
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