The Uruguayan government confirmed on Monday a raft of measures to attract Argentine tourists and compensate the restrictions in Argentina to purchase foreign currency (dollar-clamp) and the 15% retention fund for credit or debit cards operations outside the country.
Uruguayan president Jose Mujica has plans to meet two, probably three times before the end of the year with his peer from Venezuela, Hugo Chavez to address “a real integration” of Mercosur, not limited to trade, but at the same time admitting that Venezuela is rapidly becoming one of the main markets for Uruguayan exports.
The world's leading economies gave themselves a bit more space on Monday to meet targets for cutting budget deficits rather than risk worsening a slowdown in many countries, chief among them the United States.
Henrique Capriles, the runner-up in Venezuela’s recent presidential elections, commented on comparisons between Argentina’s and Venezuela’s governments in an article published on Sunday in an Argentine provincial newspaper.
A Ghanaian court authorized on Monday to have Argentina’s ARA Libertad navy training frigate, impounded over a lawsuit filed by a US based fund, removed from Tema’s commercial port to another local pier in order to liberate space that’s crucial for the in and out of cargo liners.
According to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the International Labour Organization (ILO), labour markets in Latin America and the Caribbean were fairly resilient to the slowdown in the regional economy in the first half of 2012, which bodes well for a positive outcome in this year's employment and unemployment indicators.
The number of job seekers in Spain soared to the highest level in at least 16 years in October, the Labour Ministry reported on Monday. As recession deepens the number of officially unemployed jumped by 128,242 people in October which means about 4.83m people were jobless at the end of last month, an increase of 2.7% on September.
Spain's NH Hoteles has received a preliminary offer from US private equity firm KKR to buy bonds that can be converted into shares of the debt-laden hotel chain. NH Hoteles, Europe's third largest business hotel operator based on rooms, has long been tipped as a private equity target given its large debt and that of its savings bank shareholders, which together own nearly a third of the firm.
Standard & Poor's lost a landmark case in Australia over top-flight ratings given to financial products that collapsed in the build-up to the 2008 global economic crisis. The Federal Court of Australia on Monday ruled that S&P AAA rating of constant proportion debt obligation notes created by banking giant ABN AMRO and sold to the councils of 13 Australian towns had been misleading and deceptive.
The leading world economies pressed the United States on Sunday to act decisively to avert a rush of spending cuts and tax hikes, warning that the so-called ‘fiscal cliff’ is the biggest short-term threat to global growth.