It is a fact that with the victory of Donald Trump in the elections last November in the United States and the beginning of his second term as president of that country as of last January, the world has been placed in an environment of greater uncertainty whose Effects on the performance of the main economies, including Mexico, are still difficult to estimate.
Trump’s systematic threats and the main members of his cabinet, against various sectors within the United States and of course also against a large number of countries that were traditionally considered allies of our northern neighbor, has caused all Actors, political, economic and academics worldwide, assume that the shocks that such threats will cause will be more constant.
In the United States alone, for example, retail sales during January suffered a collapse, while observing prices behaviors that begin to worry, because far from aiming a decrease in inflation, they could translate into pressures on it . In the same sense, a fall in the investment amounts announced for clean energy projects is recorded, at a minimum level that has not been registered since August 2022.
Various industrial sectors in the United States are in expectation of how Trump’s policies will evolve, that is, they are preferring to postpone investment decisions. North American farmers still have no certainty about the impact that tariffs on steel and aluminum imports will have on their production costs.
All of the above is reflected in a certain way in the index on the uncertainty of economic policy worldwide (the Global Economic Policy Uncertainty Index), prepared by researchers from various universities in the US, which in January this year reached the highest level recorded since which began to be published in February 1997, even above the maximum reported during the years of the Covid-19 Pandemia, which was observed in May 2020.
All of the above I bring it up because this panorama takes Mexico very poorly stopped, even if from the National Palace insists on wanting to convince ourselves. To start, in the agricultural field, it is anticipated that corn production in 2025 will be less than that of 2024, which was a bad year, but even less than that achieved in the last year than the 4T insists on calling The neoliberal period in 2018.
A similar panorama is emerging with the production of crude oil and the viability of Pemex, the low influx of users to use the Mayan train –med against its installed capacity. In the same position, the telecommunications sector is placed, with the Government’s desire to become one more operator (with advantages over commercial operators, of course), or the electric field, in which the government’s determination to put the obsession with Control that industry, above the country’s needs to have a greater generation of electricity at lower costs.
And if all of the above we are crowned with the disaster that is emerging with the process of choice of ministers, magistrates and judges, and the damage that this will cause on the performance of the Judiciary, which will be directly related to the learning curve that will result from the Absurd radical change, because it is evident that there are complicated years for the country.
It would be worth it that the president begins to think what route he really wants to travel the country, because he is determined in that designed since 2018, it is clear that he will take us to a greater lag than the one we once feared.
*The author is an economist.
