Policies·mx_1982_peso_devaluation_moratorium

Mexican peso devaluation and debt moratorium (1982)

MEX·1982 – 1982·enacted 1982-08-20candidate

movesfinancial deregulation↓central bank independence↓

What the policy did

17 February 1982 controlled devaluation from 26.6 to 45 MXP/USD; 5 August 1982 transition to two-tier exchange rate; 20 August 1982 ("Mexican Weekend") Silva Herzog announced to US Treasury that Mexico could not service ~USD 80bn external debt, triggering the Latin American debt crisis. IMF Extended Fund Facility negotiated November 1982; Bank Advisory Committee debt-restructuring followed.

Policy-content fingerprint — what this policy moved, on which axes

Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.

unintended / side-effect

↓

financial deregulation

regulatory.financial_deregulation

Financial-sector regulation — banking separation, capital requirements, cross-border activity rules, derivatives oversight.

decreased · strong · unintended

looser financial regulation

Exchange controls and capital-account restrictions imposed August 1982.

↓

central bank independence

monetary.central_bank_independence

De jure and de facto independence of the central bank from fiscal authority. Per D.1.5 scope, one of the framework's defensible monetary positions.

decreased · moderate · unintended

lower independence (fiscal dominance, politicised appointments)

Enacted by

mexico_lopez_portillo_pri_1976_1982

Empirical evidence — linked hypotheses

Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".

Major episodes of financial deregulation — the 1999 US Gramm-Leach- Bliley repeal of Glass-Steagall, the 1986 UK Financial Services Act ("Big Bang"), Chile's 1974-1981 banking liberalisation, Sweden's late-1980s credit-market liberalisation, and Japan's 1996-2001 Big Bang — are followed within 10 years by higher-than-baseline incidence of banking crises, measured by the Laeven-Valencia Systemic Banking Crisis Database, and by elevated credit-to-GDP gaps per BIS.

financial_deregulation_crisis_vulnerabilityinferred

viaregulatory.financial_deregulation

SUPPORTED — sign matches claim +, ATT=+0.04145, p=3.34e-07, N=302, treated_countries=8

supported

Liberal democracies experience monotonic positional drift toward larger, more redistributive states across multi-decade horizons.

liberal_democracy_managerial_flywheel_driftinferred

viaregulatory.financial_deregulationmonetary.central_bank_independence

REFUTED — median final drift = -3.00 (13/26 positive, share = 50%). The corpus does not show monotonic statist drift across the liberal-democracy panel.

refuted

Truss 2022 mini-budget shows that unfunded fiscal expansion above the ZLB triggers sharp bond-market and currency responses through expected-inflation and risk-premium channels.

unfunded_fiscal_expansion_above_zlb_bond_market_responseinferred

viamonetary.central_bank_independence

SUPPORTED — GBP/USD trough on 2022-09-26 (1.0703) was 5.02% below the 2022-09-22 pre-announcement close (1.1269); log-decline +0.0515 clears the 3.0% threshold …

supported

UK Truss mini-budget 2022 gilt crisis reflected market confidence and institutional-framework rupture rather than an MMT-predicted hard fiscal limit, because the BoE restored order by intervening as issuer.

uk_truss_mini_budget_currency_sovereign_mechanisminferred

viamonetary.central_bank_independence

partial — Both mechanism legs are directionally consistent but at least one fails the SUPPORTED threshold: FX leg holds (5.02% trough decline); yield leg partia…

partial

Argentina's 2001-2002 crisis — convertibility regime collapse, December 2001 corralito freeze on bank deposits, January 2002 currency-board abandonment, sovereign default, pesification of bank balance sheets, and real-GDP contraction of >= 10% peak-to-trough — is the canonical case of a hard-peg / currency-board collapse compounded by banking-system suspension.

banking_crisis_argentina_2001_corralito_canonicalinferred

viaregulatory.financial_deregulationmonetary.central_bank_independence

SUPPORTED

supported

The 2007-2009 global financial crisis originated in household-debt-financed consumption sustaining aggregate demand despite stagnant real wages, a Minsky-plus-Marx pattern.

gfc_household_debt_wage_stagnation_linkinferred

viaregulatory.financial_deregulation

PARTIAL — coef=-0.01111, p=0; claim direction not auto-inferred

partial

In an OECD panel 2000-2023, increases in OECD Product Market Regulation (PMR) stringency and increases in regulatory uncertainty (proxied by year-to-year changes in the OECD PMR sub-indices) are negatively associated with private non-residential investment as a share of GDP, with effects concentrated in capital-intensive long-duration sectors.

hayek_regulatory_uncertainty_investment_chillinginferred

viaregulatory.financial_deregulation

REFUTED — coef=-3.98 (sign opposite claim +), p=0

refuted

Argentine quarterly real GDP, having contracted in 2024H1 under the Milei stabilisation shock, recovers along a trajectory that by Q4 2025 closes at least 50% of the peak-to-trough output gap observed during the shock's worst quarter, and by Q4 2026 returns to or exceeds the pre-Milei (Q4 2023) real-GDP level.

milei_shock_therapy_output_recovery_trajectoryinferred

viamonetary.central_bank_independenceregulatory.financial_deregulation

partial - Level-recovery legs hold (2025 = +3.0%, 2026 = +6.4%) but ARG cumulative 2024-2026 log-deviation +8.1% does NOT exceed peer mean +14.1% — recovery, bu…

partial

Similar historical policies

Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.

Massa-era stepped devaluations and multi-rate FX regime (2023)

ARG·2023

match

1.9

financial deregulationcentral bank independence

Malaysia ringgit capital controls and peg 1998

MYS·1998

match

1.7

financial deregulationcentral bank independence

García 10%-of-exports debt-service limit (Peru, 1985)

PER·1985