By Don Quijones, freelance writer, translator in Barcelona, Spain, but currently in Mexico. Raging Bull-Shit is his modest attempt to challenge the wishful thinking and scrub away the lathers of soft soap peddled by political and business leaders and their loyal mainstream media. This article is a Wolf Street exclusive.
If there’s one word that has dominated the post-crisis vernacular of policy makers, central bankers, economists, think tanks and establishment journalists worldwide, it is the word ‘reform.’ In the last six years of centrally planned post-crisis crisis, scores of countries have been subjected to ‘ambitious’ reform programs, largely at the insistence of reform-obsessed institutions such as the IMF.
The programs have included health reform and education reform (in both cases with a heavy emphasis on privatization and increased costs); pension reform (cuts to public pensions, hikes to the entitlement age); fiscal reform (less spending on public services, more spending on deadbeat banks – all funded, of course, by higher taxes on the middle class); and, last but not least, labor reform (making it easier for corporations to hire and fire but mainly fire). In fact, we’ve had just about every kind of reform one can possibly imagine, with one glaring exception: meaningful banking reform, for the simple reason that by now the banks are far beyond reform.
The Great Reformer
One country that has recently taken reform to an art form is Mexico. Since taking office in late 2012, President Enrique Pea Nieto has made it his mission to transform Mexico beyond all recognition. And judging by the first 21 months of his six-year mandate, he means business.
This post was published at Wolf Street on September 14, 2014.
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