In the latest twist to the heavily publicised reserve kerfuffle, President Cristina Fernández has this week replaced her contested decree to tap the country’s foreign exchange buffer with a slightly tweaked order to the same end. According to local media, the central bank, now governed by one of Fernández’s close allies, has already started transferring [Read more...]

The fixed income investment community has been shaken up by growing concerns over Greece’s creditworthiness, which appear to be spreading like a bush fire across eurozone peripheral states. While concerns over significant sovereign credit risk are currently limited to the euro area and Dubai, my colleagues at BMI believe that Latin American government credit, too, [Read more...]

Risk Watchdog and his colleagues at Business Monitor International (BMI) have grown very bullish Latin American currencies. Three views in particular stand out and form part of the BMI Global Key Market Views portfolio:

Last Friday, my colleagues at BMI initiated a long Chilean peso/short US dollar view, which hit the initial CLP510.00/US$ target within days, [Read more...]

One of the things that has been keeping me awake at night lately is Japan’s horrendous government debt burden. This is already more than 170% of GDP and will only keep rising as the budget deficit surges this year and GDP plummets. I forecast government debt reaching 250% of GDP by the end of 2018, [Read more...]

Here we are again. Another global economic slowdown, another spike in global risk aversion, another collapse in soy prices, and another Argentine sovereign default. Or at least that’s what the 1-year CDS is pricing in, currently trading at 4,615 basis points. That’s no joke – it now costs US$461,500 to insure US$1mn against an Argentine [Read more...]

It’s been a long time coming. After several false dawns, Argentina’s authorities have finally announced their intention to reopen the 2005 offer for holdouts who chose not to participate in the country’s bond restructuring deal. At this stage, it is difficult to distinguish fact from fiction, but according to local media, three banks (thought to [Read more...]