The fabled frog, everyone knows, is cooked to death because
it fails to realize that it has to escape
from a pot of water that is slowly heating up to the boiling point.
With inflation, that history would have to be rewritten.
Every time they leave home,
Argentines notice
that prices are rising at an exasperating speed, they are aware that they must get out of this situation as quickly as possible, but
they also realize that the pot is covered
: there is no escape.
Everyone knows that a normal life is impossible in a pot like this, that the steam will end up causing an explosion, and that the people who are in charge of operating the burners have no idea what to do to make
the
temperature go down and they have no intention of facing the consequences of getting their hands on this matter.
The 7.7% is disturbing for several reasons.
It is not just the worst result of Sergio Massa's management as Minister of Economy, or, more broadly, of the presidency of Alberto Fernández.
It is the worst number of all the Kirchner governments, or, if you like, of the last twenty years.
In addition, if the measurements of the first two weeks of the month are taken into account,
it could happen that April's inflation is even worse
than March's and starts with the number 8 followed by who knows what decimal.
The political consequence of accelerating inflation is plain to see: the opposition is in trouble because it has too many candidates and
the government is in trouble because it has none
.
There is no pro-government electoral campaign that can survive year-on-year inflation of more than 100%: in this context, those who support a candidacy will be forced to talk about anything except government management, a true nightmare that is difficult to sustain for days.
With Massa on a trip, it was up to Matías Tombolini, Secretary of Internal Commerce, to put up his face to try to explain the 7.7%.
The official blamed it on the drought and the heat.
At the climax of his message,
he blamed Chinese stores and supermarkets
, two outlets that were excluded from the price programs agreed upon by his own Secretariat despite supplying the country's poorest population and concentrating the majority of food purchases.
Due to this exclusion, which prevents them from accessing the products at an agreed price, in recent months hundreds of stores and small supermarkets have had to close their doors, as can be seen in any neighborhood.
Tombolini, to put it another way, said that those who suffer from inflation are to blame for inflation.
He also mentioned the price makers but, since he did not give further specifications, someone could count that sentence in the field of self-criticism.