South America

Mauricio Cárdenas, Colombia’s finance minister in 2012-18, has told GlobalCapital that emerging market nations would struggle to raise the financing required to fund measures to treat the Covid-19 pandemic and consequent economic slump. “Difficult years are coming” for EM, warned the former official.

Martín Guzmán, Argentina’s finance minister, said on Friday afternoon that the country was “ready to intensify interaction” with international bondholders ahead of a debt restructuring. But with authorities set to announce further spending to protect its people from the economic impact of Covid-19, the IMF echoed the government’s view that a fiscal surplus was unfeasible in the short term.

Colombia’s Ecopetrol became the first of Latin America’s big national oil companies to launch an action plan to combat the continued fall in oil prices as it looks to preserve cash.

Latin American governments looking to shore up their economies in the fact of the coronavirus pandemic generally have less room for fiscal stimulus than they did before the 2008 financial crisis, warned Fitch Ratings on Wednesday as the region’s bond markets plunged even further.

Colombia’s Ecopetrol became the first of Latin America’s major national oil companies to launch an action plan to combat the continued fall in oil prices as it looks to preserve cash.

Though Latin American bonds offered some consolation to investors on Friday, the relief is likely to be short-lived as the region buckles down to fully face the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

A sharp sell-off in Argentina’s international bonds is likely to have a major impact on the government’s attempts to restructure nearly $70bn of debt, but there was disagreement as to whether lower secondary prices would make life harder for the borrower.

Moody´s slashed Bolivia’s credit rating from Ba3 to B1 and placed its outlook on negative as it warned of a “material erosion” of the landlocked country’s fiscal and foreign exchange reserve buffers in recent years.

The Inter-American Development Bank officially postponed its Annual Meeting from March until early September on Tuesday, confirming what many potential attendees had expected.

On what some EM investors described as the worst day for markets since 2008, Latin American bond buyers were left staring at a sea of red as the region’s fixed income markets were stunned into dysfunction by the sharpest fall in oil prices since 1991.

The Province of Buenos Aires said on Monday that it had hired Bank of America and Citi to advise it on its debt restructuring.

Even as yields in Latin America’s top-rated credits reach all-time lows amid a US Treasury rally, volatility will likely prove too tricky for most of the region’s issuers to navigate primary markets in the short term, said bankers.