Money is not given on trees, but neither should it be obtained at the expense of savers…

As Spenser Johnson’s book puts it, the idea has been created that what we took for granted regarding our savings may well change from one day to the next. There is a widespread idea that, with total impudence and impunity, the federal government will be able to dispose of various capitals that have been accumulated in accounts that no longer show movement. But the confusion is great regarding two sources of capital that present totally different nature and legal characteristics.

On the one hand, there is what is related to the savings funds accumulated for retirement and that are the result of the benefit scheme designed for workers. Here, I have repeatedly heard that the government is going to appropriate these resources; The idea derives from various declarations in which the President of the Republic has expressed that the pension system will be reviewed again. The foregoing is due to an incontrovertible situation: the CONSAR data indicate the bad run that this accumulation of capital presents to the extent that the losses in the Afores already exceed the capital gains.

In this 2022, only in the months of March, May and July, there have been gains while the rest of the year has seen an extremely adverse outlook. But in this area, it will be difficult to advance to do something to reach a single system of concentration of funds with government control. There, the Social Security Law and the Retirement Savings System Law have already been studied and modified for convenience, and the margin to take such mandates to the point of disappearance is almost nil due to the social resistance that this would provoke.

On the other hand, the controversy is enormous when the possibility of reforming the Law of Credit Institutions has been established so that the government can dispose of funds from accounts without bank movements in the past three years. Here it must be said that in fairness the proposed scheme is the extension of something that is already practiced and exists. If for six years within the Mexican banking system there is an account that does not present movements whose amount ranges between 50 and 300,000 pesos, prior notice to the beneficiary, the funds are moved to a concentrating account to subsequently allocate them to public charity.

In this reform carried out on article 61, the time and destination of the corresponding monies are modified. That is to say, if an account does not present movements for three years, notification is made and subsequent movement to a central account to allocate it in a proportion of 45% to the federal security forces, 30% to the state security forces and 25% to the municipal

What is worrying is that the federation is already showing signs of a lack of resources. Money doesn’t come from trees, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of savers either.