A symposium at the Baker Institute in Houston on May 21, 2019 was dedicated to an evaluation on the performance of the administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in its first six months of office. The keynote speaker, Bill Udell, an executive with Control Risks, a global security consultancy, opined that many of the actions of the president could described as "positivity accelerators," while others could be seen as "negativity accelerators." Of actions and measures in the first-listed category, he cited the president's support of a new trade agreement with the United States and a refusal to be baited by the press into making negative comments about his American counterpart. He also cited the high qualifications of persons appointed to the Central Bank and Finance Ministry.