Uruguay's Minister of Economy Danilo Astori announced Wednesday the country's economy would expand 4.6% in 2007, after having finished the third year running of expansion above the region's average.
Argentina's stock market ended 2006 with an unprecedented yearly average increase of 35 percent which placed it among the world's top ten performers, the Argentine Institute for Capital Markets (IAMC, in its Spanish acronym), said in a report. Several other world markets also reached record highs.
Latinamerican currencies are expected to begin 2007 with the same upward tendency as during the end of 2006 as foreign investors' flock to emerging markets.
The latest release from the Brazilian Central Bank, based on private sector estimates, downgraded to 2.74% the 2006 GDP expansion. For 2007 the estimate among a hundred leading business men and analysts is that the economy will grow 3.5%.
While the government praised it as reinstating certainty, some savers saw it as the end of a nightmare and banks continue mum and mulling its possible implications, law experts said that the Supreme Court ruling that ordered banks on Wednesday to reimburse savers in pesos dollar deposits frozen during Argentina's 2001 economic debacle, was fairly reasonable.
The planned purchase by Standard Bank †South Africa's largest private bank by assets †of most of US' Bank of America Corp.'s BankBoston Argentina assets, marks the first large investment by a foreign player in the sector since Argentina's 2001-2002 economic meltdown, and an attention call for competitors, banking sources told MercoPress.
Five years later and in a long-awaited ruling, the Argentine Supreme Court ordered local banks to reimburse in full their customers savings that were frozen during the economic crisis of 2001/02, when Argentina also defaulted on its foreign debt.
The US dollar bill's standing as the world's favourite form of cash is being pushed aside by the five-year-old euro with the value of Euro notes in circulation totaling 614 billion compared to the equivalent 588 billion Euros in greenbacks.
Sales of new homes in United States picked up in November following a big drop in October, while the backlog of unsold homes on the market became somewhat smaller, according to the latest report from the Commerce Department released Wednesday.
Argentina's Central Bank international reserves are set to reach 43 billion US dollars by the end of next year according to estimates from the private BBVA Banco Francés, released Tuesday in Buenos Aires.