Today's second snippeties proves there is newsworthy financial stuff going on down hereAs anticipated yesterday by Alonso Soto at Reuters (that guy nails so many Ecuador biz scoops it's scary), Ecuador today replaced (now ex) Finance Minister Wilma Salgado with her deputy (and Correa's old classmate) Maria Elsa Viteri. New girl Viteri is being painted as more market friendly than Salgado for what it's worth (not much).
Bloomberg reports Argentina's country risk zoomed to over 1,000 basis points as he world craps itself about AIG and possible fallout. It's pachakuti* all right; the safe bonds all go to hell and the risky bonds keep on paying but have to suffer the consequences of those people working at the safe bonds companies. Klishtina was right to gloat the other day.
Venezuela wonders what all this noise about "peak oil" comes from and announces a futher 9.4% hike in proven oil reserves to 142.3 billion barrels. That's a lot, isn't it? Well yes it is, but if you realize that Venezuela has only started a sytematic program of proving up its resource fairly recently, that there were only 80 billion barrels in the proven and probable column this time last year, and US Energy department experts think there could be as much as 1.36 Trillion (yep, with a "TR") of total crude reserves in Venezuela we're really only just starting to scratch the surface here. But the whole USA/Venezuela thing is not about oil. Oh no no no no no no no......
Incakola toldya over a week ago; it really is all over for Aurelian. Kinross reports today that it has bagged over 90% of the total float and the compulsory purchase order is just around the corner. Like it or hate it (I hate it), you accept it. Impossible to fight against idiotic management, and Patrick 'Albatross' Anderson is now demostrating to CSI.to holders how his idea of adding value works (down 30% in the week since he scrambled on board).
Away from the world of stock market terrors, Brazil really is doing quite well. Retail sales were up 11% YoY, reports bloomie today.
* Quechua; "the world turned upside down"