MEXICO | Banxico extends currency market intervention On 22 September the governor of Mexico’ s central bank (Banxico), Agustín Carstens, announced that it will continue to sell US dollars in the local currency market in order to manage the peso-dollar exchange rate after the end of the dollar auction mechanisms that it has been implementing. Banxico began auctioning dollars in the local currency market on a daily basis back in December when the dollar began rapidly appreciating on the back of signs of a stronger US economic recovery and amid the expectation that the US Federal Reserve (Fed) would move…

The double whammy of lower production and a declining world oil price have impelled Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) to make budget cuts this year, but the State oil company’s problems have been exacerbated by a surge in fuel theft. In the first eight months of the year, there were 3,547 illegal taps, up 50.6% on the same period in 2014, amounting to losses of M$13.2bn (US$783m), or more than M$50m a day. At the present rate losses will top US$1bn by the end of 2015. The number of illegal taps along Pemex’s sprawling network of ducts in the first eight months…

Mexico’s two main opposition parties at a federal level will next year renew the electoral alliance that helped defeat the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in three key states in 2010. During an extraordinary national congress at the weekend the left-wing opposition Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) voted to empower the party leadership to use its discretion to forge an alliance with the right-wing Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) in states where it could “stop the PRI”. The difference is that in 2010 this was more or less an alliance of equals; now, with the emergence of Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (Morena),…