Brazilian Foreign Affairs minister Antonio Patriota revealed that Brasilia is following closely the situation in Venezuela because of the medical condition of President Hugo Chavez, to whom he sent a message of quick recovery.
Billionaire Warren Buffett's company is making another foray into US newspapers, agreeing to buy 63 newspapers from Media General Inc for 142 million dollars.
Ratings agency Moody's has cut the credit ratings of 16 Spanish banks, a further blow to a country that is struggling to deal with the bad debts of its banking sector. It also cut the debt rating on Santander UK, a subsidiary of the Spanish banking giant.
Chile’s central bank kept its key interest rate unchanged at 5% for a fourth consecutive month as surging domestic demand and deterioration in the global economy leave little scope to change monetary policy.
A freedom of information law has taken effect in Brazil, challenging an embedded culture of secrecy and bureaucracy. Proponents, including President Dilma Rousseff, said the measure is nothing short of a revolution for a system that has kept tight control over information for decades.
Spain’s Foreign Affairs minister Jose Garcia Margallo said that Madrid supports negotiations for a free trade agreement between Mercosur and the European Union on a “region to region” basis, back stepping from his proposal last April to exclude Argentina following the seizure of YPF from Repsol.
The recent tax-info exchange agreement reached between Argentina and Uruguay will make many investors in the Uruguayan financial system take their deposits back to “safes” or “mattresses” in Argentina, warned several economists during a conference on the Argentine economy prospects and its influence on neighbouring Uruguay.
Argentine provinces are falling back in paying salaries and honouring debts as they face a shortage of cash and almost record rates for issuing bonds in money markets, reports Buenos Aires financial press.
In what would be his last speech as part of the organization, Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank Justin Lin held a conference at the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin American and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in Santiago de Chile.
Uruguay’s state-owned power company UTE, is spending over seven million dollars per day to contain the deficit originated in poor rainfall that threatens production from the country’s four main hydroelectric generating plants.