The company isn’t bankrupt, it just doesn’t have the right currency in its reach to repay debts coming due. YPF is Argentina’s (former) gold mine, in this case the black gold of energy exploitation. State-owned, the business has obviously close ties to the ruling powers-that-be and a privileged place to go along with them. Its formal name, Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales, [...]
Last week, IHS Markit reported that sentiment in Mexico’s factory sector had slipped again during December 2020. The organization’s manufacturing PMI had declined for the second straight month, having peaked recently back in October. Even then, the index hadn’t yet come close to crossing the magic 50 dividing line. The best it had managed during this global rebound was a [...]
The Chinese have never subscribed to the modern wave of “transparency” which has swept over Western central banks. The People’s Bank of China, Big Mama, very much operates instead on the doctrine which preceded it. Basically, Montagu Norman’s way of doing things. Never explain, never excuse.This mantra has been applied to what it does outside of China as much as [...]
I’m not exactly sure how you translate the English word “hope” into Chinese, though Google’s translate algo tells me this is what it’d be: 希望. For the global economy to have any chance of just making next year less awful than it’s already predicted to be (by the optimists), the OECD declared China essential to the fanciful anticipation.As noted before, [...]
Brazil’s Minister of Economy Paulo Geudes told members of the local press last month that the country was on track to lose about 300,000 “formal” jobs in 2020. Though employment growth has slowed there in the second half of the year, as it has worldwide, Geudes was quite proud of his achievement. After all, though hundreds of thousands of Brazilians [...]
Trump or Biden? Will we even know tomorrow? Many purport that markets are leaning one way or the other, typically based on whichever market leaning puts whatever preferred candidate in the most favorable light. Everyone’s a winner in the run up. I don’t think there’s a lot of trading that goes with either candidate. As things stand right now, from [...]
Survivor’s euphoria, but then what? Reopening momentum, though would that be enough on its own? More of a concern, the uptrend was heavily infused by government intervention. How much was organic, how much wastefully artificial (in the sense of “stimulus”; as economic aid, it was necessary)? So many questions, so much to try and sort out as we enter the [...]
It’s always something. There’s forever some mystery factor standing in the way. On the topic of inflation, for years it was one “transitory” issue after another. The media, on behalf of the central bankers it holds up as a technocratic ideal, would report these at face value. The more obvious explanation, the argument with all the evidence, just couldn’t be [...]
Back in early June 2018, the Brazilian real was in free-fall (again). Never bothering to explain why or what was happening, the country’s top central banker just gathered the media together in front of him confident in how what he’d say to its members would be reported as fact. As it was. Not just by Brazil’s press, either. Even if [...]
Flash PMI’s for September 2020 around the world add more evidence to the possibility of a global slowdown during the economy’s all-important rebound quarter. Q2 was the big downturn, and so it always going to be Q3 where the bounce back would be sharpest. While that has definitely been the case, concerns are mounting for what might follow in Q4. [...]
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