Fernando Gonzalez placeholder image
02/17/2021 10:24 PM
Clarín.com
Opinion
Updated 02/17/2021 10:33 PM
Martín Guzmán is not the Prime Minister of the Economy to be celebrated at a public event.
The applause offered by the businessmen who went to the Casa Rosada a week ago
have a history
that is always useful to refresh.
Above all, because
these anticipated cheers are not a necessary or sufficient condition
for the management of the applauded to end unfailingly in success.
It is already known that Argentina is a perfect laboratory when it comes to finding the ways of failure.
Therefore,
the most advisable investment for half a century continues to be prudence.
The radical leaders were not prudent on December 1, 1985, when they
picked up and carried Juan Vital Sourrouille on a litter
through the rooms of Parque Norte.
They were in power by the hand of Raúl Alfonsín, they had just won the legislative elections and
the Austral Plan had been victorious for just five months against inflation.
"Luckily I did not lose my virginity or my wallet," said then that honest economy minister who would finally lose the battle against the cost of living.
The UCR would leave the Casa Rosada
in the midst of social chaos and hyper.
Neither were the businessmen who cheered Domingo Cavallo at the time of that
one peso-one dollar
dogma
, which he launched during Carlos Menem's government, a
law that seemed the panacea for economic collapses.
And they repeated the recklessness on March 27, 2001, the afternoon in which he took office to save Fernando De la Rúa.
"Convertibility is not going to be abandoned,"
promised Mingo, so that the ovation of a frightened establishment was repeated.
Nine months later it was learned how all that ended.
The privatization of YPF was also applauded with Menem, with the vote of Oscar Parrilli and
with the indulgence of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner.
In the same way that the nationalization of the supposedly free oil company was applauded, to later pay 5,000 million dollars in cash and another 6,000 in bonds with which
there will be indebtedness until 2034.
The economic ministers of that very expensive Argentinization were Amado Boudou and Axel Kicillof .
As long as you take a look at these few antecedents, because there are many more in the recent past, the researcher and academic Guzmán
will have an unbeatable parachute
with which to escape the trap.
It is that
the Argentine economy continues downhill.
It is true that the pandemic conditions all the countries of the planet and it is also true that the negotiation to refinance the debt with the bondholders had an acceptable end.
But the recession does not find the floor from which to bounce and
inflation is emitting more and more alarm signals.
The applause for Guzmán came when the minister explained that the cause of the rise in prices was macroeconomic imbalances.
They could also have applauded him if he had said that the cause of wet earth is rain.
The issue is
how to prevent and mitigate the effect of the storm.
The AFIP reported yesterday that, between November 2019 and the same month of 2020,
no less than 22,176 companies closed in Argentina and 296,000 jobs were lost.
Shops, offices, workshops, SMEs, jobs, projects and dreams that collapsed.
There is Minister Guzmán one of the concrete challenges to solve in the three intense years that await him.
Meanwhile, the leaders who applauded him could do a more forceful exercise of prudence and
avoid the easy enthusiasm
that so dazzles and blinds the ministers who then burn themselves in hell.
