A real economic plan is urgently needed and without “sarasa”

Everything is possible, in a government of movements often dislocated, conducive to the most diverse interpretations. A strong case arose when the minister Martin guzman He met with the director of the IMF to let the financial world know that Argentina is not going to get rid of its feet and, almost at the same time, Cristina Kirchner asserted: “We cannot pay the debt, we have no money. “That, which is today strictly true Regarding the 46 billion dollars with the Fund which expires in 2022-2023, the vice-president is making noise and adding mistrust where noise and mistrust abound.

It seems too much that Cristina does not notice that in snubbing the Minister of the Economy too snub the president who appointed him and feeds conjectures about the stability of Guzmán; too much that it also deploys a confused political campaign with non-payment of debt when scarce reserves are lost and the country suffers from lack of credit and when investment has accumulated a decline of only 31% in the two last years. First, always first, above it is proposed to conduct an agreement with the mistreating opposition to end the bimonetarianism, that is, with the domination of the dollar.

It is therefore not strange that the recent package of price controls bears the seal of the Ministry of Productive Development but not the endorsement of the person who heads it. Matias Kulfas. It’s the job of Paula Spanish, the secretary of commerce who reports formally to Kulfas and who, for similar things, does not report to Kulfas but to Axel Kicillof, that is, Cristina’s favorite economist.

There, inside an informative of 27 pagesWe have everything and everything in quantity: from food, tobacco, furniture, appliances and detergents, to drinks, iron, steel, cosmetics and etc. as long as injustice. That is, a card that covers a large part of the economy, plus buy and sell prices, inventory, costs, production destination and bonuses. A mountain of data that entrepreneurs must update every month.

An example, to better understand what sizes we are talking about, consider that in supermarkets they manage 105,000 different items with their stocks, more than 12 million pricess and sales of $ 995,953 million last year; let’s say a trillion or 10 billion US dollars at the official exchange rate.

Raises a consultant with no intention of discovering gunpowder: “With the sieve that are public agencies, companies will hide sensitive information, which can go to their competitors and they will cover them with numbers that are very difficult to process. As happened with the computer surveillance that, in 2014, Kicillof put in place and which failed even to scratch inflation ”.

It is clear that if the package is huge, it cannot be equated with a anti-inflationary policy, which is certainly something more complex, more elaborate and of course more coherent. Finally, it remains to be imagined that this is an open door to pressure on prices and supply levels from certain companies; a model à la Moreno only without Moreno.

With a cost of living installed at 3% per month, sometimes long, and wholesale prices pushing 6% and approaching 50% annually, it’s hard to find who thinks that in 2021 inflation will end at 29%. that Guzmán plans. The latest poll by the Central Bank of fifty institutes indicates 48%, nearly 20 percentage points above the minister’s forecasts.

And if Guzmán already thinks of another number, he will never count it. Because it is too early to throw in the towel or unleash dangerous expectations and, above all, because it is a bet that the wage increases agreed in parity will evolve in the 30% zone and therefore do not put more pressure on prices. Of course, if income loses to inflation again, as happened with the real 20% drop over the 2018-2020 period, private consumption will continue to be submerged underground.

In Argentina, this variable, which makes the GDP needle rise or fall like no other, fell last year to the levels of 2008-2009, ten years ago and when there were 5 million inhabitants of less than today. The first data for 2021 indicates that she has not yet returned.

Another sample of a endless economic decline with a lot of social, it appears in the number of registered workers, in white, employed in the private sector. Among the best gains among the poorly paid on the market, the number has steadily decreased to approach 2009. Without going too far, they are now 5.8 million, or about 500,000 less than. 2018.

In the next column we have the public employment, growing up and often associated with politics: nearly 3.3 million workers or 725,000 more than in 2012, the bulk of which was installed in provincial and municipal governments.

And if between the private and public workers they bring together 47% of white employees, towards the margins of the system we find a huge contingent of self-employed workers and black workers, poorly paid and always unstable, who jump jumped from 47 now at 53%. This process is called loss of quality of work or obvious degradation of work, despite the employees.

Already crystallized, the big explanation behind this image that gets worse from where you look at it is in the the collapse of private investment; for more data, the source that creates long-term, generally stable, productive and better paid jobs.

The latest statistics from INDEC sing a volume equivalent to 13.4% of GDP, the lowest record since 2004, when the series began. Never during these 16 years has the investment reached 25% of the gross product, which is considered useful to guarantee a firm and sustainable economic growth; the cap was nailed at 19.7% in 2007, 13 years ago.

So, from tumble to tumble, the variables inevitably lead to a decline in economic activity, which has happened in 16 years against only 21 years of growth since the return of democracy. End to end, with the exception of Venezuela in Latin America, none of them did worse than Argentina. Just to top the malaria bar, in 2020 it was 9.9% red.

And concerning the bimonetarianism which worries Cristina so much, perhaps a great political agreement is not necessary. All it takes is a well-articulated program that puts inflation below 10% per year for the dollar to cease to be this old refuge against the decline in the value of the peso. Nothing to throw the ball only to business leaders, to work for the one who is ultimately his government.

But if we speak of agreement, it seems urgent to set fundamental and very concrete objectives, also instrumental, to start to come out of the swamp in which we are stuck. And without sarasa.