Mexico and Brazil, having seen the economic destruction that high inflation can wreak, don’t want to see it again.
Latin America will soon be hit by a wave of business bankruptcies and defaults, according to Jesús Urdangaray López, the CEO of CESCE, Spain’s biggest provider of export finance and insurance. CESCE insures companies, mainly from Spain, against the risk of their customers not paying due to bankruptcy or insolvency. It also manages export credit insurance on behalf of the Spanish State.
CESCE’s biggest clients are large Spanish companies with big operations in Latin America. For many of those companies, including Spain’s two largest banks, Grupo Santander and BBVA, Latin America is its biggest market. CESCE’s three biggest shareholders are the Spanish State and, yes, Spain’s two largest banks, Grupo Santander and BBVA.
BBVA, which is heavily invested in Argentina, warned about the worsening situation in the country. If Argentina’s economy continues its inflationary spiral, it could end up affecting BBVA’s overall performance and financial health, the Spanish bank said.
Argentina’s government is once again trying to restructure its foreign-currency debt with the IMF, having already defaulted on the debt once since the virus crisis began.
Ecuador was first to default on its foreign currency debt, followed by Argentina, then Surinam, Belize, and Surinam twice more — six sovereign defaults so far in 13 months.
Latin America has been hard hit by the virus crisis. But the region’s cash-strapped governments with weak currencies and surging inflation cannot afford to provide the sort of financial support programs being rolled out in more advanced economies. Fiscal response has added just 28 cents of extra deficit spending for every dollar of lost output…
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Fig 1: Brazil’s oil production, net imports and bio fuels
Fig 2: Venezuela’s oil production and net exports
Fig 3: Brazil vs Venezuela monthly crude production
Perhaps the most remarkable trend in global macroeconomics over the past two decades has been the stunning drop in the volatility of economic growth. In the United States, for example, quarterly output volatility has fallen by more than half since the mid-1980’s. Obviously, moderation in output movements did not occur everywhere simultaneously. Volatility in Asia began to fall only after the financial crisis of the late 1990’s. In Japan and Latin America, volatility dropped in a meaningful way only in the current decade. But by now, the decline has become nearly universal, with huge implications for global asset markets.
Investors, especially, need to recognize that even if broader positive trends in globalization and technological progress continue, a rise in macroeconomic volatility could still produce a massive fall in asset prices. Indeed, the massive equity and housing price increases of the past dozen or so years probably owe as much to greater macroeconomic stability as to any other factor. As output and consumption become more stable, investors do not demand as large a risk premium. The lower the price of risk, the higher the price of risky assets.
Consider this. If you agree with the many pundits who say stock prices have gone too high, and are much more likely to fall than to rise further, you may be right—but not if macroeconomic risk continues to drain from the system.
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