Latin America

Investors became comfortable with Lula's economic team, his cabinet, and his general attitudes towards markets. The bottom line was that Lula inherited a strong, vibrant economy and was smart enough not to mess with success. Will Humala…

With markets now contemplating some sort of debt “re-profiling” by Greece, we thought it would be helpful to summarize the two most recent major debt restructurings by an EM borrower for some guidance on what such a move could imply for…

In April 1989, Mexico's external debt negotiator, Angel Gurria, asked his country's commercial bank creditors for a 55 percent haircut. This was the opening pitch of the newly created Brady Plan, which finally addressed both the debt…

We are seeing divergent inflation paths in Brazil and Mexico, and today’s mid-April data underscored this point.

What we would like to see is commodity prices falling or stagnating. And that would certainly be the case if demand destruction is already beginning as the IEA analysis suggests. Moreover, QE is ending in June. So that won't be a factor in…

In Peru, populist candidate Ollanta Humala won the most votes in the weekend presidential vote in Peru, winning 29.3% so far with 75% of the ballots counted. By falling far short of the 50% + 1 needed to win, a second round vote will be…

By Win Thin Malaysia central bank surprised the markets by hiking the statutory reserve requirement 100 bp bp while leaving policy rates unchanged at 2.75%. The bank noted that “While the stance of monetary policy is expected to remain…

Hugo Chavez as peacemaker? Color us skeptical. Chavez is hardly an impartial third party in this conflict, as he has cozied up to Qaddafi over the years. As such, we would not expect opposition forces to be very open to any sort of Chavez…

By Win Thin Colombia surprised markets with a 25 bp hike to 3.25% late Friday, and marks the first hike of the tightening cycle as the central bank tries to get back ahead of the inflation curve. The deciding factor behind the hike was…

Moody’s upgraded Uruguay two notches to Ba1 from Ba3 previously, bringing it into line with S&P’s BB+. We recently added Uruguay to our sovereign ratings model universe, bringing the total number of EM countries ranked to 39. As we…