Pablo Ibáñez
02/23/2020 - 15:55
- Clarín.com
- Politics
- They had no faith ...
It's late, but Alberto Fernández is satisfied and happy. In his office at Casa Rosada, about 9 pm on Wednesday, the President allows himself a relaxed, soberly celebratory talk, with a small handful of collaborators.
Hours earlier, the IMF issued a document with strong support for the Argentine position: the admission, implied that the fund lent more than it owed to Mauricio Macri, and the request to private holders to accept a take-off .
"For this we were working and we did it. Now we have to continue: whoever thinks the game is over is wrong, " Fernandez went down. During the day he shared several hours with the Minister of Economy, Martín Guzmán; and, as every day, he interacted with his chief of staff, Santiago Cafiero, the Secretary of Legal and Technical Vilma Ibarra and the General Secretary, Julio Vitobello .
"They said that we had no plan and now the fund understands that there is a plan: that we cannot pay that way, that the fiscal order can be achieved gradually but that, in addition, we need time to grow and be able to pay ," Fernández told his team.
The President pivots between Guzmán, Cafiero and Matías Kulfas, the Minister of Productive Development, attentive to two indicators: inflation and economic activity . They are the two thermometers that in Fernández's head operate in parallel to the debt renegotiation.
The chief of staff, door through the President, has an application on his cell phone to follow the evolution of prices and revenues day by day, almost hour by hour. The computer program concentrates the value at which 900 products are sold in supermarkets and hypermarkets.
With this app - which was built in Internal Trade - the Government monitors two very sensitive variables: the performance of Care Prices and the electrocardiogram of prices, which come together because the rise in food in January was 4.7%, double of the total index.
A few days before the end of February, this tester makes him fantasize to the Government that this month's inflation will confirm the decline recorded in January and with the projection that the quarter , with a rebound in March that "historically inflationary" , closes closer to an average of 2 points than 3.
The other thermostat is the collection of VAT as an indication of the progress of the economy . On Monday, the head of AFIP, Mercedes Marcó del Pont, spoke of "symptoms" of reactivation from the collection data but said they were still very preliminary to make that statement.
In Presidency those indexes follow. They slide, very cautious, that there is a slight rebound in VAT revenues that could reflect, precisely, that the economy signals that it is moving.
Earlier, the President had lunch, for almost two hours, with Axel Kicillof and Juan Quattromo , an economist who led the Province Bank. Fernández participated in the creation of the BAPRO holding company in the 1990s. Kicillof stayed, at the table, chatting with Guzman, who was already optimistic about what the IMF would communicate.
In the complete mapping of the "achievement" to the IMF, the Government ties several pieces. Among the reasons why the President believes that the agency considered the debt "unsustainable", there is a socio-economic, a symbolic and a third geopolitical issue. Guzmán, in line with Fernández, brought the social issue into conversation with the IMF and it was, ten days ago, that he asked Daniel Arroyo and Ginés González García, Ministers of Social Development and Health, to join the mission of the background.
This happened: Julie Kozak, deputy director for the Western Hemisphere - who was with Arroyo because he later traveled to Washington for the board meeting - and Luis Cubeddu, head of the mission, transmitted that the IMF "did not ask for adjustment in social areas".
The Government synthesizes it in a brutal phrase. "There is no room to pay without sending millions of Argentines to misery . And we will not do that."
The other factor is, if you like, symbolic: Fernandez says that the only way for a negotiation to go well is "telling the truth . " He repeats it as a mantra and his team amplifies it: that is why, in public, the president used the phrase that the IMF "gave the reason" to the Argentine Government, in relation to which too much debt was accumulated to pay in a very short time.
The third is, in logic Fernández, key and is linked to the round of conversations, face-to-face and telephone, which he had throughout the last month: from Pope Francis, to Angela Merkel and Donald Trump. In Government they read that the conflict that crosses - from end to end - South America makes the Argentine situation more carefully treated.
With the crises in Chile and Bolivia, a fragile scenario in Ecuador and Peru, the accelerated deterioration of Venezuela and with Brazil in the hands of Jair Bolsonaro, Europe and the USA. They seem willing to "help" Argentina so as not to add tension to the continent. It is the reading they do in the Government.