Ratings companies used to have a great name. No longer. The subprime mortgage crisis has seen to that. Once seen as being blue chip companies with a sterling reputation, the ratings companies have now come to be seen as part of the sordid network of double dealing in Wall Street in which conflicts of interest and outright dishonesty led to millions losing money, while the fat cats of the ratings companies raked it all in.
South Korea and Japan reopened their markets to Chilean pork, according to a release in Seoul from the Ministry of Agriculture and Food.
Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer prediction on when the UK economy could start to recover may be optimistic, a director of the International Monetary Fund has said.
The world can expect another record crop of rice totalling 640 million tons, equivalent to 434 million tons of the elaborate grain, according to a report from Uruguay's Rice Planters association.
The mighty Parana River, one of South America's main waterways which connect the River Plate with the heartland of Argentina, Brazil and landlocked Paraguay and Bolivia has reached a low of 1.02 meters of water just 9 centimetres from the all time record of 0.93 in 1917.
In spite of a record year of exports, Brazil's 2008 trade surplus reached 24.7 billion US dollars which is a significant 38% descent compared to the previous year when it totalled more than 40 billion US dollars.
The Venezuelan government has cut the official number of dollars Venezuelans can spend abroad with their credit cards from $5,000 to $2,500 a year.
The Uruguayan government will intervene, if necessary, in the domestic market distribution chain to ensure that the full benefit of the falling international prices of commodities effectively reaches the consumer, announced several ministers following the Monday cabinet meeting.
The lack of mechanisms to correct asymmetries and finance infrastructure projects are the biggest hurdles for Mercosur and Latinamerican integration, according to the Brazilian presidency main foreign policy advisor Marco Aurelio Garcia.
The Paraguayan GDP expanded 5.8% in 2008 with a good performance in almost all sectors and a record per capita income, according to preliminary figures from the Central Bank released this week.