President Javier Milei He will face the next days of government with a renewed strategy, if what he has demonstrated so far can be called that way. This is demonstrated by the survey that the president launched in the last few hours to check whether the opposition’s dialogue blocs will accompany, in the Chamber of Deputiesthe new one “Bases Law”. Everything seems to indicate that this will be the case. Good news.
However, it will not be without changes. As far as he could know Ambitthese same deputies, -and we will have to add to the Pro bench-, have already sent their message: they want to modify the two key chapters of the package of laws pushed by the Government. One of them is the one that refers to the mobility of retirement benefits. The other is the one that reinstalls the Earnings application for the company’s employees. fourth category, a stubbornness included in the “fiscal package.”
All in all, the hypothesis that this column handles is simple: the president has decided to hang his anarcho-capitalist theoretical painting with messianic overtones, to give way to another, more earthly, political and less orthodox from an economic point of view. Of course, the key will be not to focus so much on his Twitter crusades or imprecations encouraged by his eventual interviewers and to pay attention to the developments of the last few hours.
So that it is understood, it is not an apology for freedom. Much less, a call for the return of rhetorical violence. Nor is it a proclamation of the conceptual free will of theolar or extreme dollarization, seeing that the trap continues. But we will have to think – quickly, if possible, if what dawned as a cry for milleist freedom – the famous “Viva la Libertad Carajo” (VVLC) – is not transforming into its own resounding shadow, a small class demiurge B, not recognized, and raised in the heat of libertarian shame that, due to ailments in parliament and governorships, never I would confess the need to give in to the rule of the most basic pragmatism.
There is news: dollar, rates and surplus
The last few days recorded other good news for the Casa Rosada in the economic front: February inflation was lower than expected, purchases in the BCRA’s MULC amounted to more than US$10 billion in management, and the financial surplus of public accounts was recorded in February due to the continuity of the chainsaw. On the other hand, the rejection of the DNU showed that the limits. In any case, the “hard dollar” bond quotes After the news became known, they were not beaten.
The Government has begun influence prices and wages in the economy. And he does it in an unorthodox way. It is an informal intervention, by dint of words, recommendations, rhetorical incentives, pure meetingism. It’s a novelty. In terms of prices, and shaken by the data for the first two weeks of March in food, an increase of around 6.9% according to LCG, Minister Caputo has just called an aefood companies, supermarkets and speaking to businessmen last week at the AmCham Summit.
There, he attempted an unprecedented exercise by pointing out the responsibility of Alberto Fernández’s government for generating such negative expectations that companies were forced to astronomically raise their prices. The initial devaluation – a 118% jump for the dollar – had nothing to do with it, nor the enormous wave of increases in relative prices.
As it turned out, the idea was to lower the line – stop, guys – to those who were market deregulation enabled them, the free play of supply and demand. Minister Luis Caputo had already maintained the same “technical talk” last week. That conversation took place with the 12 business groups that produce 80% of the goods consumed by Argentines. Caputo protested the offers, the 2×1, 70% discount on the second unit, etc., and requested an honesty of prices from the companies so that the lists register the withdrawal and Indec can note it.
He insisted on this theme via Alejandro Fantino, this weekend, by retweeting a fragment of the journalist. In the deathly silence of his office, someone from the sector must have explained to the minister that, paradoxically, companies make these types of offers so as not to lower prices and add some profit. volume of your sales. As the reader will realize, the Government’s concern is not focused on the rise in the cost of living (basic services, prepaid, schools, transportation, etc. increase) but in the data, the index, which, in the conception of the Casa Rosada, this would endanger the idea that “inflation is decreasing month by month, 25 %, 20%, 15%…”. The index matters more than inflation.
One more from the last hours. Minister Caputo’s heterodoxy also extends to the review of relative prices. According to him, both Transportation and Energy (gas) could be “managed” and eventually postponed so that they do not impact the March measurements. Thus, the monetary forge recognizes its well-marked limits. We will see.
Salaries and adjustment: a job of tweezers
Something similar happens in terms of salaries. The Government bets on deindex salaries and pensions –in the middle of an inflationary cyclone – and to do so it not only liquefies the income of the elderly, but also puts the spoon in joint negotiations. The data here is that 35% of the adjustment that the Government applied in February is due to retirements and pensions.
Along these lines, heterodoxy has also reached these shores. Although it has been taking place for a few days now, the intervention made by Economy has become more intense with supposed limits in these negotiations. Vox populi, the Government sets a ceiling of 19% for January agreements, 15% for February and 12% for March, despite the enormous inflation rate. That is the line that goes down to the Ministry of Labor, a kind of informal safe conduct, if the union in question wants to settle the dispute without delay. It must be kept in mind that in the first two months of the Government, the real salary of registered workers measured by the RIPTE fell by 20.7%.
Along these lines, one more: as published Ambit, at least a dozen unions do not have legal approval of their agreements for salary increases with companies. In that way, Work deprives them of a key tool to demand them.
There are several questions that fit into this framework. One is due to the current DNU 70/2023, which has repealed the system of regulations that affected issues as sensitive as food prices for the domestic market, but which has not been replaced by any tool, not even monitoring. Another is for the BCRA crawling peg policywhich although it is betting on the exchange rate anchor strategy – it devalues 2% monthly – will nevertheless have to recalculate soon, since the anchoring quickly takes away competitiveness from the economy and could discourage the liquidation of exports by agriculture. Will a new rise in the dollar put further pressure on prices? And the salaries?
Source: Ambito
