In one of his latest books, the fifth riskAmerican journalist Michael Lewis elaborates on the most important danger facing the United States today: the administration of public policy projects and programmes more than such phenomena pandemics, wars or weather disasters (among other risks mentioned by Lewis). “Managing risk is a task of the imagination. And human imagination is in short supply when evaluating them. People are good at responding to crises once they happen, like a pandemic or war, simply because they imagine what just happened is very likely to happen again. The risk we have to fear most is not easily imaginable.
Two weeks before the beginning of the Cambiemos government, the Supreme Court ordered the nation to return the funds to three provinces that had confronted Cristina Kirchner (whose government was about to end) and there was no was a trace of it.
“It hadn’t even been confirmed that he would become Minister of Justice,” recalls Germán Garavano. “The ruling was surprising.”
On the same day of the announcement, the incoming president had met Cristina Kirchner in Olivos with the aim of outlining a transition and coordinating the work of the ministries. There was no official information or photos from that meeting.
Can all risks be countered and prevented, as Lewis points out?
The answer is a resounding ‘no’ when you factor in a day later Macri presented his Cabinet as “the best team of the past 50 years”. No one in that team had thought of such an event. This is how the sequence of events reveals it:
– The Friday before the runoff with the Kirchnerist candidate, Daniel Scioli, a small group of technicians from Fundación Pensar (the PRO think tank that had recruited most of its economists among other experts in the previous five years) gave him a presentation Macri himself at the Emperador Hotel, in Avenida Libertador. Economists, political scientists and sociologists displayed a series of cards with traffic lights indicating the risks that Cambiemos’ management would have had to face on all fronts in the first 100 days. Macri arrived dressed in tennis, listened to the whole presentation and asked only one question on the fiscal front with the provinces. He ate a chocolate. He went away.
– Sunday was the ballot. Macri President.
– The Supreme Court released its decision on Tuesday. None of Macri’s team had anticipated such a thing. The High Court forced the state to return 15% of the tax sharing that had financed the Anses (the pension fund) since 1992 to the three provinces that had made these transfers after the nationalization of the AFJP in 2008. The provinces had relinquished those resources to the Nation in the 1990s to finance the disequilibrium of the pension system which had lost the income that now went to the AFJP. But its nationalization in 2008 gave rise to that process on which the Court ruled tactically in the days before the new government took office. The sentence was signed by three judges of the Court: Ricardo Lorenzetti, Carlos Fayt and Juan Carlos Maqueda. Elena Highton has not signed.
One of the consequences of that move by the Court was the proposal in Cambiemos to Macri to appoint a member of the Supreme Court to neutralize and oppose the decisions of Lorenzetti, identified in Cambiemos as “unreliable” because he had suddenly ordered the suspension of the three-way discounts provinces causing an unforeseen tax cost to the nation. “Thus Horacio Rosatti arrived at the Court,” says someone close to Macri and that he was a senior official.
The attorney and now Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was sworn in as that body’s minister six months after the partnership decision. And it was the first addition to the Court in 12 years, to be followed by Carlos Rosenkrantz.
The 2002 crisis was another example of how the democratic rule between justice and government was broken in Argentina. The then Economy Minister, Jorge Remes Lenicov, went to his office to see the head of the Court, Julio Nazareno, to evaluate the decisions on the corral that put the stability of the financial system on hold.
“The playpen?” Nazarene asked the minister. The box is the topic that interests me the least. They want to kick me out.
But returning to the 2015 case, “the decision of that Court perhaps responded more to the interests of a Peronism that had confronted Kirchnerism and was now willing to implement governance in exchange for resources”, explains today an important former minister Macri. The ruling benefited Córdoba, Santa Fe and San Luis. “In any case, the Court’s brake on the increase in gas has had a greater impact than this co-participation”.
‘The Fifth Risk’ What Lewis points out in his book is ultimately perhaps nothing more than a miscalculation. To what extent do you control everything?
Source: Clarin
