Rolando Cordera Campos: Between perspectives and denials

N

or has it only been the Fund World Monetary Fund, but also the World Bank, the Swiss Banking Union and the Bank of America, which have recently released the downward adjustment of their projections on the trajectory of the world economy. The first glimpse of the figures puts us between the three economies with the greatest laghow he headed The universal the note about it. To put it soon, along with this diary, Mexico, Spain and Thailand will not recover from the 2020 crash.

Let’s take note of our numbers: in 2020, the economy fell 8.2 percent; it grew 5.3 percent in 2021 and this year its product will increase by 2.8 percent. The percentages of the world indicate that in 2020 it declined 3.1 percent, it recovered in 2021 when it reached 5.9 percent and it is expected that this year it will reach 4.4 percent. If we do a simple operation we will see that our economy fell, in 2020, more than double the world’s decline; in 2021, we grew six tenths less and in 2022 our estimated growth will be 2.8 percent compared to 4.4 percent that has been considered for the planet.

Bad news, especially if we make an effort of sociological imagination to have some trace of the suffering and anxiety that the collapse has meant for millions of Mexicans. And not only from the material shortages, resented by many, but from the mental damage, now summed up by the word depression, which spreads in and between families and communities, without any possibility of saying that the authorities have taken note of the magnitude of the problem and have started to act accordingly.

Bad economy. worst job. Scarcity of essential goods, rupture of channels and productive and value chains, lead us to think of greater economic evils that remind us of the specters of stagnation that Professor Hansen baptized in the 1930s as secular and that at present the economist Larry Summers has once again suggested as a probable scenario for the most advanced economies. Not to mention ours, reconverted to a high degree like the old social formations mirrortightly tied to the global economy and its leaders.

Is it possible to consider, quickly and sensibly, the possibility of coping with such ominous trends? Is it possible that the government reacts? Is it possible that it puts its productive, financial and human resources machine at the service of majority social protection? Is it possible for the government to assume, as part of its tasks and obligations, the promotion of economic activity, the diversification of our structures and capabilities?

Both world experience and ours, throughout the 20th century and at the first critical junctures of the current one, show that, without the help of political economy, of politics translated into economic policy, the scenarios of economic paralysis, decline and accelerated loss of social cohesion, democratic and political shrinkage in general, will be more than specters and can drag the country into destructive circumstances of great and enormous depth.

Decline without boom is not just a gloomy prospect, it is a scenario that looms as the crises plaguing the world and the species take over the global scene.

There are no alternative shortcuts or escapes, except for the agreement that we can all build and make a reality through social cooperation and political consensus. It is not one more option but an essential task to begin to see ourselves, to recognize ourselves again as we are and as we can be, which the pandemic has prevented and the constituted power crushed with its absurd solipsism and no less aberrant arrogant triumphalism. The devil’s favorite sin, in version of Al Pacino in his huge Devil’s lawyerwhich today may well serve as a port of relief.