La Jornada: Mexico’s emergency fund against fiscal crisis amounts to only 136 thousand 604 million pesos

The main emergency fund that Mexico has in the event of a fiscal crisis does not have a sufficient balance to cover the delay that, at least until the first half of 2026, drags down income collection in the country, according to official information.

At the end of June, the Budget Income Stabilization Fund (FEIP) – the main fund to cushion a fiscal crisis in the country – reached a balance of 136,604 million pesos, reports from the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit show.

This trust has been recovering, after it was practically emptied between 2019 and 2020 to counteract the effects of the economic recession of those years.

However, only in the first half of 2026, the delay accumulated in the collection of public income exceeds what is in that emergency fund, being 141 thousand 3.4 million pesos below the agency’s program.

The available balance of the FEIP implies an advance of 9,596.8 million pesos in the first half of the year. However, it still does not exceed the balance it had before the crisis due to the coronavirus pandemic.

This newspaper consulted the Treasury about how wide the gap that public finances can allow in the lag in income? Is there a possibility that this situation will normalize in the second half of the year? In addition to the FEIP, what other mechanism can these shortfalls be solved with? At press time, there was no response.

According to what was programmed by the Treasury, in June, public income should reach 4 billion 418 thousand 357.4 million pesos; Preliminarily, they have remained at 4 billion 277 thousand 354 million with delays in all concepts, except for non-tax income, those of the IMSS, the ISSSTE and the value added tax, which alone almost exceeds 100 billion additional pesos.

“The lag represents an important challenge, but it still seems manageable. What will be decisive in the coming months is the evolution of tax collection, the performance of economic activity and the ability of the Treasury to maintain discipline in the exercise of spending,” explained Janneth Quiroz, director of Economic, Exchange and Stock Market Analysis at Grupo Monex.

He explained that in relative terms, those more than 141 billion pesos are “an manageable deviation for public finances, especially considering the size of the federal budget.”

Without counting the resource via debt, the Treasury projected budget income of 8 trillion 721.1 billion pesos for 2026.