Friday, October 31, 2008

End of the Quarter

World is under an economic turmoil and we still have the quarter numbers to execute. The interesting part of this is that after all that gambling and all those fiction projects we still have to go back to sell more and more. Ok! I can do it, but isn't about time to people review some concepts, some procedures. I don't think we can keep believing on the myth of all market will go up. I'm just looking to find out where is the bottom and what is at the bottom.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

FED lends US$ 30 billion to Brazilian Central Bank

This a very interesting day, the USA central bank has lended US$ 30 billion in US currency in exchange for the same amount of Brazilian currency (of course the exchange rate was used) to help the Brazilian authorities cope with the crunch for dollars in Brazil.
Brazil after many years is finally becoming a predictable economy with very sophisticated and severe controls to maintain inflation under control and reduce the external and internal deficit.
Since 1994 Brazil has been reducing the inflation, reducing the government debts, has repaid the IMF and has been amassing very substantial reserves in US dollars, currently the reserves are US$ 203 billion.
What is really interesting is this kind of operation in Latin America was only done between the FED and the central banks of Brazil and Mexico.
Can anyone imagine how much upset Cristina and Chavez are right now?

Saturday, October 25, 2008

So what is going to happen now with Venezuela

Chavez has been destroying Venezuela little by little year after year, I have been in that country many times since 1983.
I was there on 9/11 when the towers came down and I was there after that as well and every time I see a more deteriorate country, with more problems, more conflicts and more people feeling hopeless.
Mr. Chavez like some of his friends in Boliva, Brazil (thank God we managed to contain them here), Ecuador, Paraguai and Nicaragua have a firm belief that they can go against the market rules.
They are expelling the foreing companys, foreign capital anf foreing nationals if they were the devil and they only want to exploit those poor nations.
Funny that at the same time all those countries have been losing the most competent technicians and bureaucrats who have left their homelands to another countries and those countries need maximize their resources they lack the personel.
Now we are going to a recession that will hit them when they need to be more prepared, now they won't have human resources and capital (unless China manages to convince them to step aside and let them be invaded by Chinese operators) to develop their resources and improve their economies.
What Venezuela will do with the state of the art jets from Russia, PDVSA already lack technical people to develop and operate their own oil industry (Venezuela's production is shrinking quarter after quarter), how can they help Bolivia and Ecuador?
Maybe one of the greatest benefits of this crisis will be that those countries will have to get rid of those chief of state and to once more embrace their own destiny and to overcome their own limitations.
We can only hope and pray!