REGION | Wen looking to cement long-term economic relationship. On 26 June China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, proposed before the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (Eclac) the creation of a China-Latin America & Caribbean cooperation forum in order to strengthen economic and political ties and a cooperation fund to be used to promote this. Prime minister Wen’s visit to the Eclac headquarters in Santiago, Chile marked the end of a week-long visit to South America in which he visited virtually all the countries that make up the Southern Cone (except for Paraguay) and made some very interesting…

The ratings agency Moody’s Investors Service has downgraded eight Brazilian banks and the country’s stock exchange operator as part of its global financial sector review, just days after the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) warned that Brazil and India, in particular, would not be able to avoid contagion from the Eurozone crisis. These latest warnings underline the fact that emerging markets are increasingly vulnerable to the continued crisis in the Eurozone. There have been a slew of negative signals out of Brazil this week, led by news that non-performing loans (corporate and consumer) had increased again in May. In its…

The escalating confrontation between President Cristina Fernández and Hugo Moyano, the secretary general of the union of truck drivers (Schoca) and of the general confederation of labour (CGT), was like watching the head-on collision of two articulated lorries: everyone could see it coming for miles but neither ‘driver’ could apply the brakes to stop it. When Moyano called a general strike last week, it became clear that after some eight months of increasingly hostile verbal diatribes, the union leader was ready to show his hand. By all counts, the mobilisation to the Plaza de Mayo this Wednesday (27 June) was…