Argentina

Argentina’s economic woes may spell the end of traditional mergers and acquisitions this year, while paving the way for some companies to snap up battered assets, according to Lazard Ltd.’s Matias Eliaschev. “Currency volatility, increased country-risk spreads and general turmoil in emerging markets will make closing transactions more challenging,” Lazard’s chief executive officer for Latin America, excluding Mexico and Brazil, said in an interview, Bloomberg News reported.

Struggling to staunch a run on the peso that has helped drive the economy to the brink of recession, Argentina is aggressively pushing investors out of some of the local debt notes they hold, Bloomberg News reported. It is a risky gambit -- the opposite of the kind of measure a country would typically take at a moment of great financial duress.

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the former president of Argentina, on Monday sought to paint herself as the victim of a conspiracy in the face of bribery allegations that have unsettled markets and led to comparisons with the corruption inquiry that has shaken Brazil, the Financial Times reported. Ms Fernández de Kirchner called for the case to be abandoned in written testimony on the first day of her trial, and took to Twitter to denounce what she claimed was a conspiracy between Mauricio Macri, her successor, his media allies and Claudio Bonadio, the presiding judge.

The corruption scandal that broke in Argentina last week could be a political godsend for President Mauricio Macri -- and an economic nightmare for the country. A federal judge is probing hundreds of alleged bribes paid by construction companies, energy suppliers and electricity generators to members of the former government of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, Bloomberg News reported. While the accusations may derail Fernandez’s hopes of a comeback, aiding Macri, they could also halt investment in a country already threatened with recession after a collapse in the peso.

Argentine companies will sell at least $5 billion of overseas bonds by March, reopening a window that has been closed for the past three months amid economic volatility, according to the head of Itau Unibanco Holding SA’s international fixed-income unit, Bloomberg News reported. Between $3 billion and $4 billion will be sold by a group of firms recently awarded public-private contracts to build roads, while the remainder will come from blue-chip companies, according to Baruc Saez.

A recent run on the peso is pushing inflation ever higher. Prices could rise by as much as 30 per cent this year — or about triple the rate that President Mauricio Macri was hoping for in 2018. But for most Argentines, this is business as usual, the Financial Times reported. With the exception of a currency board experiment in the 1990s that ended with a disastrous financial crash in 2001, Argentines have lived with punishingly high inflation for longer than most can remember.

Signs are mounting that Argentina is headed toward recession in the next few months, less than two years after emerging from the latest one, Bloomberg News reported. A severe drought and currency crisis shook Latin America’s third-largest economy just as President Mauricio Macri sought to consolidate its incipient recovery. Economic activity fell 2.7 percent in April, the largest monthly decline since Macri took office in December 2015. Growth also declined on an annual basis for the first time in 14 months, the nation’s statistics agency reported Tuesday.

Argentina’s central bank is getting a new chief after the monetary authority failed to stop the peso’s plunge despite obtaining the biggest loan in the history of the International Monetary Fund, Bloomberg News reported. Luis Caputo, previously the finance minister, will take over the post following Federico Sturzenegger’s surprise resignation. Investors need him to lay out a strategy to curb volatility in the currency, which has lost more than a quarter of its value since the end of April, including a selloff of more than 6 percent Thursday that left it at a record low.

Markets welcomed the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) $50 billion rescue stabilization package last week, which seems to be stabilizing the peso. But the financial umbrella will be costly, a Bloomberg View reported. Rightly or wrongly, Argentines blame the IMF for precipitating their country's worst economic crisis. In the eyes of many voters, the mere association will damage President Mauricio Macri’s standing.

If you are going to go, go big, and get on with it. This advice applies widely, if not universally. Certainly it fits economic interventions. Argentina and the IMF, thankfully, have followed it. The IMF’s financing deal for Argentina, a country facing a falling currency and brutal inflation, was expected to take about six weeks to agree; it took a month, the Financial Times reported. Speculation pegged the value of the package at $30bn or so; it came in at $50bn. The market’s initial response to the surprise has been positive. Argentine bonds rallied on Friday morning.