Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Photo: Google

By THE PULSE NEWS MEXICO STAFF

According to government figures, Mexico’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) contracted by 0.43 percent in real terms during the third quarter of 2021, compared to the second quarter of the year — almost twice the 0.23 percent contraction disclosed earlier this month by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi) — but a deluded President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) is still promising a 6-percent annual growth.

In a morning conference on Thursday, Nov. 25, AMLO said that he was still confident that the country’ economy will rally an end-of-year economic surge thanks to the creation of new jobs and foreign direct investment (FDI).

“The economy is growing and my forecast that we are going to grow 6 percent this year will be fulfilled,” he said, speaking in Zacatecas, shoo-shooing financial institutions’ predictions of further contractions and spiraling inflation rates, already above 7 percent.

“There have never been so many workers registered with the National Institute of Social Security (IMSS). We have already exceeded the number of workers that we had before the (covid-19) pandemic and are about to reach 21 million people registered with the IMSS.”

López Obrador, who, since taking office three years ago, has consistently rejected his own administration’s figures, claiming that he “has different data,” went on to say that all the jobs lost during the pandemic have already been recovered and that the labor market has even expanded by nearly half a million new jobs.

In addition, he said, there has been a boom in the Mexican Stock Exchange, a rise in the minimum wage and a record number in FDI.