Yearly Archives: 2018
The Flip Side of the Coin
Luis Rubio All of the crises that Mexicans have experienced have been the result of a president who stopped doing his job or who did it badly. That is the price of a system centered on a sole individual: his moods, capacities, quality of his responses and errors determine the result for 120 million […]
The Challenge Is Another
Luis Rubio Trump has been a headache but for a reason that we Mexicans are obligated to accept: because we have not built a platform of certainty for the citizenry to be able to lead their lives in a normal manner. Overwhelmed by the insecurity, the bureaucratic excesses and the permanent economic ups and downs, […]
What Was the Error?
Luis Rubio We Mexicans are fed up with the violence, the slaughter, the extortion, the abductions, the lack of security and the cavalier attitude manifested toward these by the authority. In this regard there is nearly absolute and universal consensus. Where opinion divides –and polarizes- is in what to do about it and, above all, […]
The Treasury vs. the Economy
Luis Rubio The great learning gleaned from the crises of the seventies through the nineties was that economic stability depends on prudent management of public finances. Whenever fiscal accounts became unbalanced, generally due to excessive expenditure that led to growing public debt, there was a devaluation of the peso and the entire society suffered. The […]
Development
Luis Rubio Something evidently failed. The idea was that the country would adopt a set of strategies and economic reforms and that, within a reasonable time, the country’s economy would be transformed and, with that, it would move decisively towards development. Although today the reforms of the last decades are criticized a lot, it is […]
Mexico and China
Luis Rubio After four decades of extraordinary transformation, no one can doubt the enormous ambitions of China as a world power, now aided and abetted by the retreat launched by Trump, leaving it fertile ground for its political and strategic, as well as its economic, expansion. Napoleon thus understood it from 1817 when he declared from […]
The Essence of Democracy
Luis Rubio At the “Speakers’ Corner” in London’s Hyde Park, something very peculiar happens: a few people get up on a bench and commence to rant and rave against the government, the Queen, the European Union, Trump and any other target that occurs to them. The key is the bench, which (figuratively) removes the person […]
Control: What For?
Luis Rubio Ever since its Independence in 1821, Mexico has enjoyed two periods of high growth with political and social stability: the Porfiriato (1876-1910), and the decades of the hard PRI, between the forties and the end of the sixties. The common denominator was the centralization of power and the vertical control that the president […]
Good, For Whom?
Luis Rubio Mexican lawyers often say that “a bad deal is better than a good fight.” I imagine that’s what the NAFTA negotiators were thinking when they reached an agreement that does not meet any of the needs, or the reasons why the NAFTA was negotiated in the first place. The best that can now […]
And the world begins to spin again…
Luis Rubio The days and weeks pass and the reality begins to sink in: things are more complex than the government in the making supposed and anticipated. The question is what it will do about it. The speed with which the president-elect took control of the discourse stunned all of Mexico -and the world- but […]