While my bullish Latin American fixed income views have played out really well of late, other Latin American asset classes have been much harder to call. A case in point has been Brazil’s Bovespa equity index which, despite the rapid sell-off in April and May is trading pretty much where it started the year. I… [Read more]

On Tuesday Risk Watchdog attended Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa’s exposition of the ‘The international economy, and the process of the citizen’s revolution in Ecuador’ at the London School of Economics. Or at least that was the title of his talk. Disappointingly there was very little description of how the citizen’s revolution is progressing in present… [Read more]

Latin America will soon have a new currency, the Sistema Único de Compensación Regional, or Sucre, for short. It’s no coincidence that the currency’s acronym is also the name of 19th century regional independence leader, Antonio José de Sucre, close friend and ally of Simón Bolívar, in whose name the currency’s proponents (members of the… [Read more]

President Rafael Correa’s game of chicken with Ecuador’s external creditors finally came to an ugly end on Friday, when he announced he would prefer to take on the ‘monster’ bondholders in court rather than pay up. While many Ecuadoreans will no doubt admire their president’s courage for standing up to those responsible for the country’s… [Read more]

On November 14 Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa’s government took its first major step along its ‘citizens’ revolution’, by refusing to pay US$30.6mn of external debt on time. Correa has long threatened to put ‘life’ [social spending] before debt’, however his rhetoric was finally met with action (or rather inaction) last Friday when Finance Minister María… [Read more]