Sunday, December 29, 2013

Bloomberg Story Predicts Declining Values For Latin American Currencies

I'm skeptical enough to believe that predictions have very little power beyond the immediate future. This doesn't make them meaningless, but I don't take them at face value. My take on predictions is that they are useful for understanding the trend analysis of the predictor. Even when the prediction is wrong, walking through the analysis can be a good way to extend one's own understanding.

In that spirit I've linked to a Bloomberg story by writers Ye Xie, Eduardo Thomson and Denyse Godoy predicting a route for Latin American currencies in 2014. And indeed 2013 was a less than stellar year for that large portion of Latin American economies that is based on commodities exports. As the US economy improves there is a potential for US interest rates to move up making it harder for Latin American investments to compete with the giant sucking sound to the north. Compounding the grief China, which has been a significant investor in Latin America of late, is in retreat. And so Southern currencies are trending downward.

That said the world rarely goes as long as 12 months without a few big surprises and one can't be too cautious about over extrapolating from looking at a small piece of a large and complex system.

Click through to the Bloomberg story here:

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