Asylum on one hand, economic destruction on the other.

Beyond the stupidity, religious fundamentalism, mental retardation, anti-Enlightenment sentiment, and medieval convictions that characterize the Bolsonaro government, its ultraneoliberal economic policies, embodied by Paulo Guedes, are driving the country's economy to bankruptcy.

It is worth highlighting the latest results from three important economic fundamentals:

GDP – The Central Bank released on Monday, April 15th, a preliminary estimate of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) variation for the month of February this year. There was a 0,73% drop compared to the previous month. This is the worst result since May 2018, when the truckers' strike occurred. And market projections for economic growth in 2019 are increasingly discouraging. Financial institutions predict only a 1,95% increase in GDP, after seven consecutive declines.

Inflation – The IPCA (Brazilian consumer price index) for March, at 1,32%, was the highest for that month since 2015. Furthermore, the 2,62% inflation recorded in the first quarter of 2019 is the highest rate for the first three months of the year since 2016. Meanwhile, the accumulated rates over 12 months reached 4,76%, the highest percentage since February 2017.

Unemployment – Research from IBGE shows that Brazil currently has 13,1 million unemployed people. The unemployment rate rose from 11,6% in the previous quarter to 12,4% in the current one.

Bolsonaro supporters and defenders of his economic agenda will surely say that it is too early to analyze the government's performance, that one cannot crucify an administration that has barely passed 100 days, and that the poor or mediocre macroeconomic results were inherited from the previous government.

The problem is that there is no light at the end of the tunnel, nor will there be, because the government doesn't even have a draft plan to generate jobs and income, stimulate economic growth, and increase the country's negligible investment volume. And everything that is announced as a priority goes in the opposite direction.

Beyond the most vile and subservient surrender of the country's wealth and the obsession with pension reform, aimed at transferring a mountain of money worthy of Scrooge McDuck's money bin from the workers to the bankers, I doubt anyone is capable of pointing to a single miserable short, medium, or long-term plan for the country's economy.

In such a devastated scenario, it would be delusional to place any hope in this government's ability to think about the economy in a structured and strategic way. Its intellectual incapacity is compounded by the blind belief that the rules dear to the market can be applied to a complex economy like ours without dramatically increasing the shameful state of social inequality.

It didn't work anywhere and it won't work here. Notice that, in cahoots with the financial market and media groups, Bolsonaro and Guedes are repeating, in the campaign for the approval of the pension reform, the same mantra that Temer and Meireles used to push through the labor reform. The coup leader and his Finance Minister promised that, free from the CLT (Consolidation of Labor Laws), the country would generate more than 2 million new jobs in one year. And what happened was precisely the opposite: unemployment increased exponentially, as did underemployment and informal work.

But it's pointless to demand self-criticism from people who have no commitment to Brazil and the Brazilian people. And, to deceive society once again, they're now selling off the idealized version of Eldorado after the pension reform is approved. What a nerve!