Argentina's Macri says set expectations too high for first year

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - Argentine President Mauricio Macri, who took office last December promising to attract a wave of private investment, said on Saturday his government had generated excessively high expectations for his first year among his voters. Macri campaigned on a free-market platform, and upon taking office reversed the interventionist policies of his predecessors, loosening price controls, devaluing the peso, and cutting regulations. But Argentina's economy, which had deteriorated significantly under former President Cristina Fernandez, is still struggling to pick up pace, while elevated inflation is biting into the salaries of workers. "Perhaps in the frenzy of last year's campaign, the expectations of all of this ... generated an outlook of magical change and I think we have to get ourselves away from that," Macri said at a press conference in the coastal city of Chapadmalal. "One must know how to manage timing well, and sometimes when anxious one makes an error with timing," he added. On Wednesday, Argentina's national statistics agency said the nation's industrial production contracted 8 percent in October from the same month a year earlier, marking the sharpest monthly drop in activity so far in 2016. The Argentine construction sector performed particularly poorly, dropping 19.2 percent in annual terms. (Reporting by Maximilian Heath; Writing by Gram Slattery; Editing by Richard Chang)