Yesterday evening Peru’s beancounter stats people, INEI, released a large bucket of cold water on the Peru economy. It’s way past time that the “economic miracle” bullshit were laid to rest and the 2.01% number, well under even dampened down expectations, may be the start of the necessary reality check. Here’s a chart:
(and here’s another one, with the same dataset but running from pre-crisis 2008, just for a little more context to the main current trend).
So much for Peru FinMin Castilla’s confident predictions in late 2013 of a rebound in growth come 2014, typical political bullshit. Peru got lucky and has rode the high margins from commodities for a while, but now the luck has ran out they have no special formula, no secret sauce, nothing but a few prayers to offer to the copper price Gods. Far from creating some new and fanciful growth miracle, Peru is falling into the same classic traps of shoring up a reduced margin primary growth export model with expanded credit. And as the Pope so correctly said yesterday, it’s the poor who’ll take it up the ass when the bills need paying. Well, he didn’t quite phrase it like that because he’s a nicer person than me, but you get the drift.