Carstens Reacts

Agustín Carstens pushes back against the criticisms of Joseph Stiglitz:

It seems that Stiglitz doesn't know that Mexico was battered by two blows: the global economic recession, including in the United States, and the decline in oil production of 800,000 barrels a day, Carstens said.

"We didn't have the option of taking on more debt. One has to act responsibly and that was what was president Calderón decided and what he did", added Carstens in a forum on Mexican infrastructure projects with international investors.

The effectiveness of Mexico's response often boils down to whether or not the nation should have taken on more debt. I can't offer an expert opinion on that, but it definitely seems as though most Mexican analysts were more leery of doing so (and, like Carstens, use the impossibility of indebting the government as a justification of the response) than were foreign observers. That in turn seems to be a lingering psychological effect of the crises of the 1980s and 1990s.