New regional trend: Crises are brewing in Latin America's leftist bloc

[Zorro]

Interesting 3rd quarter predictions from Investor's Insight:

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...Argentina's financial, political and economic stability is taking a sharp turn for the worse. Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner's populist efforts to placate a variety of groups have consistently laid the foundations for future, greater problems. The juggling already has radically increased Argentina's debt and reduced the country's trade surplus by a quarter — despite soaring international prices for all of Argentina's exports. This shortsightedness is triggering unrest on a national level, sparking runaway inflation of the type that has made previous Argentine governments fall. It also is gutting the country's productive capacity in industries in which it was until recently a global leader, and is raising the specter of food shortages in the not-so-distant future — quite possibly before the end of the third quarter.

Meanwhile, Bolivia is slowly sinking into chaos as the divisions deepen between the poorer, populous and indigenous highlands led by President Evo Morales and the more European and richer lowlands. Morales will hold a referendum on centralizing power in the third quarter, essentially attempting to force the lowlands into economic and political submission. So long as the lowlands physically control the economy on which the government depends, however, they cannot be talked or voted or threatened into submission. When the government realizes it cannot resolve the situation through constitutional channels — and we do not expect this realization to occur in the third quarter — Bolivia will have its defining crisis. Until then, the imbalance of political and economic forces in the country will only become more skewed, making the eventual conflict that much worse.

In Venezuela, it appeared at the beginning of the year that the opposition was beginning to coalesce into a meaningful political force that could challenge President Hugo Chavez. That trend has since faded away, but Chavez's own economic and political mismanagement has more than compensated for the lack of threats to the regime. Chavez has in many ways become his own worst enemy. Rising food and commodity prices, combined with self-destructive means of dealing with them, have soured the Venezuelan population on Chavez's leadership and fractured the ruling party. Many of Chavez's attempts to rally nationalist sentiment — threatening war against Colombia, for example — have instead backfired badly.

The country's social stability has been reduced to the point where it depends on Chavez's lavish social programs. But the cost of these programs is rising faster than the country's oil income, making Venezuela unique among oil exporters as the only one getting poorer with global crude prices at historic highs. Against this backdrop, it would be logical for foreign states hostile to Chavez to take a swipe at him, or for domestic opposition to rally against him, but no one with the capability to hurt Chavez has a deep enough interest to take any dramatic steps (the same, incidentally, goes for the Argentine and Bolivian governments). In the third quarter we expect Chavez's credibility to take hits — abroad, but even more so at home — as the system's coherence begins to crumble...

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More at: http://www.investorsinsight.com/blogs/john_mauldins_outside_the_box/archive/2008/07/10/quarterly-forecast-third-quarter-2008.aspx

[Judi Lynn]

1. Spellbinding! Pure magic! Fabulous.

Here's your author's MySpace:

http://www.myspace.com/johnmauldin

Cool! A man of the people. Who wouldn't respect his word on Latin America's future? It's all about bidness, after all, isn't it?

[Zorro]

2. No doubt he has pretty good sources

At least as good, if not better, than the ones you typically use as "authoritative" (e.g. Xinhua, granma, etc); they're authoritative only in the sense they're controlled by their respective governments (China, Cuba), which I've noticed you never seem to mention.

Nevertheless, they are only one man's predictions, and consequently not the gospel. It will be interesting to see what does transpire in Latin America over the next three months.