More adjustment: the economic message from STEP

The government must take note that the results it has to defend until October are pithy. The average annual inflation went from 27% up in 2015 to 57% (at best). Poverty (measured by the UCA) went from 30% to more than 35%, with poverty that went from 4.5% to 8%. The interest rate in December 2015 stood at 38%, while it reached 63% Friday and is feared, it could break new records. The minimum wage was $ 580, while the minimum wage was $ 279. In 2015, 1,175,000 workers were dependent on the income tax, while this figure should now reach 2.2 million people in August. Macri will have reigned with three years of economic decline with only one growth and lower levels of industrial production than in 2015, including dramatic situations in the automotive, textile, dairy and construction sectors. .

The government will live in very difficult weeks in Buenos Aires when the IMF envoys will return to shore for the third inspection in 2019, which will be by far the largest of the year. Visitors ordered by Italian Ricardo Cardarelli will be back in the country this week for a mission scheduled to take place in Argentina between the last week of August and the first half of September. The government of Mauricio Macri would have no problem achieving the goals signed last September, especially in terms of finding budget balance, maintaining the trade surplus and the indicator that Washington is considered as essential: the rapid location of the collection. at the same level of growth as inflation. The problem of Cardarelli's visit will come from other sides. The Italian now has the head of the American David Lipton, Christine Lagarde is no longer in Washington and we still do not know how he thinks his opponent almost certain, Kristalina Gerogieva. This will be when the US $ 9,000 million usage license balance will have to be used to contain the currency, a formula Donald Trump has personally emphasized (through his Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin). ) and that Lipton never wanted, but it will last until the end of Macri's term.

The problem will come when the progress of this part of the agreement will have to be discussed with the economists who accompany Alberto Fernández or with the main candidate of the opposition live and direct. Fernandez had already made his complaint public for this "help". "Tell me, and knowing that you have political obligations, how was the last agreement approved, where the constituent instrument of the IMF is violated? How did they give Macri a similar loan under these conditions? ", Said the now official candidate to the Director General of the Western Hemisphere, Alejandro Werner, during the Mexican's visit to Buenos Aires. These remarks, which at the time were considered a far-reaching oral and public complaint, would now have the force of a dagger in the middle of a campaign where the ruling party will come back and give away daily explanations of his steps. Most importantly, the other major problem for the Washington emissaries in Buenos Aires will be questions the IMF may ask the government to consider relaunching the WWTP before October. There were those who thought of the official character of a kind of improvement of income tax for the fourth category, larger liquidations for retirees and increases in tax expenditures in general, any decisions that would have Washington's explicit veto even before being exposed. It will be time to look back and understand where the real fall began. And the picture of 28-D will be present.