Zero, zero, then 273 billion pesos.
The 2027 economic criteria, published on 8 September, carry the first budget appearance of the new strategic-infrastructure law. Third-party investment of 188.9 billion pesos flows from 2027 to 2030. The deferred payments that pay for it are scheduled: 0.0 in 2027 · 0.0 in 2028 · 134.7 in 2029 · 138.8 in 2030 — and nothing after.
Credit where it is due: we can see this because Mexico published the table. The public-finance requirement line carries it too, at 0.3% of GDP in 2029 and 2030 and zero everywhere else. The asset arrives years before the cost does, and both are in the same document.
The PPP stock rose 41% without a single new contract.
The 2027–2030 macro framework reports the present value of net PPP commitments at 4.22% of GDP at end-2025, against 3.00% a year earlier. The document says why: the rise “is explained by the inclusion of the projections” of three named contracts — a railway, a highway section and a water-treatment plant. All three were already signed. The projection caught up with them.
And this is the case that is going right. The statutory ceiling is 12% of GDP, measured net of the revenue the projects collect. The ministry also publishes what happens if that revenue does not come: 12.38% of GDP — above its own ceiling. Almost nobody publishes that second number.
Paid out 89.6 billion. Recovered 6.8 cents on the real.
The National Treasury’s monthly guarantee report: since 2016 the Union has paid R$89.58bn honouring guarantees on state and municipal credit, and has recovered R$6.06bn. The Treasury explains the gap itself — about R$79.78bn was owed by states inside the fiscal recovery regime, which suspends execution of the counter-guarantees.
These are credit guarantees to subnational governments, not PPP guarantees — and that is precisely why they matter here. It is the same promise every counter-guarantee makes: the State pays now and recovers later. Here the recovery rate is published, and it is under seven per cent.
The liability does not arrive as spending. It arrives as a debt surprise.
An IMF departmental paper published yesterday studies fiscal rules across Latin America and the Caribbean. Countries that adopted a budget-balance rule saw debt surprises fall by about 5% of GDP — the absolute forecast error on debt. Its footnote names the channel: surprises in stock-flow adjustments, “often pertaining to below-the-line operations such as the materialization of contingent liabilities… are frequently as large and volatile as headline debt surprises themselves.”
Read the three pages before this one against that sentence. A payment dated for 2029, a stock that moves when the projection updates, a guarantee honoured and not recovered: none of them passes through the deficit on the way in.
The contract is signed once. The number arrives in instalments.
Dated forward in Mexico, revised upward in Peru when the projection caught up, already paid and unrecovered in Brazil. Three ministries, three different lags — and not one of them is a term of the contract. They are all choices about when to measure:
Three finance ministries published the lag this month. That is the good news: none of these numbers came from a leak.