Mexico City — S&P Global Ratings will review Mexico’s credit rating before March 2024, said Omar de la Torre, director and lead analyst at the rating agency during a panel entitled “The post-AMLO era” at the Bloomberg Linea Summit 2023 in Mexico City on Wednesday.
Mexico’s rating, BBB with a stable outlook, assumes that there will be continuity in fiscal discipline during 2024 and in the next administration, he said. However, the evolution of the fiscal deficit and indebtedness will be monitored with a view to reviewing the rating before the elections.
“The last review we did was in March 2023, in July 2022 what we did was to revise the stable outlook to negative. Our rating has 12 months of follow-up, most likely at the beginning of the next fiscal year we will already have the review.”
Omar de la Torre, director and lead analyst, S&P Global Ratings
Mexico’s Congress approved a fiscal deficit of 5.4% of GDP, the highest in more than two decades, and a debt of almost two trillion pesos for 2024, which generated several questions from analysts and opposition legislators.
De la Torre said that S&P Global Ratings assumes that, despite the fiscal deficit proposed for 2024, no deviations are foreseen so far for any effect on the elements taken into consideration for the credit rating, since it is estimated that the high deficit would only be for one occasion.
“In principle this deficit is proposed as one-time only and would not be significantly changing our forecasts, this is important because with this indebtedness we assume that it will be reversed in the coming years,” he said.
However, if this scenario is not fulfilled or is modified, there could be a modification to Mexico’s credit rating.