The voice of the central bank

How visible and leading should the members of the Banco de México Governing Board be?

It is a good discussion, especially when their decisions have a high impact on the financial spirit of a country.

What is a fact is that an institution like the Bank of Mexico should have an active and present voice from its head. A central bank as influential in the emerging world as Banxico does not deserve an absence like that of Governor Victoria Rodríguez.

Lieutenant Governor Jonathan Heath is quite the opposite, he is an active voice in discussing the country’s monetary and economic condition, which is all very well for a brilliant man. But other voices are needed to balance and set the institutional course.

Another deputy governor who had been highly prominent is Gerardo Esquivel, who maintains a diametrically different position from Heath’s and between the two they spiced up the public discussions about the direction of the central bank’s decisions.

But it turns out that Esquivel today is more concerned about his job future than about the monetary grid and all courtesy of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who, true to his style, first exalted this economist and then threw him to the ground due to the uncertainty of his permanence in office. Bank of Mexico.

With the voice of Gerardo Esquivel annulled with that presidential whip and with the absence of the voice of the other members of the Governing Board, especially due to the almost total distance from Rodríguez Ceja, Jonathan Heath’s considerations remain as the guideline of what that comes from the Bank of Mexico.

It makes perfect sense to anticipate that the increases in the Banxico reference rate will be less aggressive than the previous ones. It may even border on common sense if we see lower pressures on headline inflation but core inflation’s resistance to peaking.

However, this advance moves the markets a week before the Bank of Mexico’s monetary policy decision itself, which will be known on Thursday, December 15, and even before knowing the inflation for November, whose data we will know very early this Thursday.

The voices of Heath and that of Esquivel, who is absent today, show that the Bank of Mexico not only maintains its autonomy from the executive branch, but that within it there is room for different points of view among true experts.

It is a relief to know that, in the midst of so much presidential interventionism, Banxico maintains that virtue.

However, it is necessary to listen from time to time to the institutional voice of the highest monetary authority in the country that allows the deputy governors to express themselves freely without their position being taken as the line of all within the bank.

There is a lot of sense in Jonathan Heath’s considerations of no longer expecting increases of 75 base points, but of half a percentage point in the reference rate.

But though he tries to make it clear that this is his opinion, his voice is so lonely that it is taken for the voice of the bank.

ecampos@eleconomista.mx