Posted on 06/08/2020 3:42:03 PM PDT by NRx
MEXICO CITY — For the second time in a month, top business leaders sat down with Mexico’s president to implore him to do more to save the economy.
People were losing jobs by the tens of thousands, they warned. Small and medium-size companies, which employ more than 70 percent of the Mexican work force, were running out of cash. The government needed to intervene, they argued. The data was irrefutable.
“I have other data,” shrugged the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, according to two businesspeople with direct knowledge of that conversation in April. “You do whatever you think you need to do, and I’ll do what I need to do.”
...Hostile toward bailouts, loath to take on public debt and deeply mistrustful of most business leaders, Mexico’s president has opted largely to sit tight despite what is expected to be widespread pain up and down the economic ladder.
...The president’s resistance, according to those who know him, is based on his interpretation of Mexico’s troubled financial history.
Having lived through numerous financial crises, including sharp devaluations of the currency and defaults on debt, he believes that bailouts and rescues simply do not work, they say.
He even wrote a book about the government bailout of the financial sector after the 1994 economic collapse known as the Tequila Crisis. Many viewed that aid as a poorly managed effort that lined the pockets of the wealthy.
Many economists and analysts say Mexico can afford to increase debt to help weather the crisis. But from the moment he took office, Mr. López Obrador, while calling himself a leftist, has won praise from analysts and economists for being a fiscal conservative.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Maybe the US could buy some land cheap and make a serious defense perimeter.
IOW,the cartels said no.
Wow! A leftist that is fiscally conservative! It seems like everyday real life is getting more like a Babylon Bee article!
Very likely that Los Carteles made him an offer he couldn’t refuse to say “no”...
Guess we know which side of the line the Times is on.
AMLO is a pleasant surprise.
“in the long run they may emerge in a much stronger position economically than many of their neighbors”
more likely they will spiral into a serious depression caused by deflation, which is what happened in the Great Depression when people were reduced to battering chickens, butter, and eggs because there was no money and the Fed refused to provide any ...
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