But we still have the bumper cars…
   Mexico’s central bank Gov. Guillermo Ortiz thinks the world economic crisis is probably past the worst but warned growth in the third quarter could contract on an annual basis.
    Speaking at the Reuters Latin American Investment Summit, Ortiz — who also fronts the Bank for International Settlements — said there is a growing sensation that the crisis may have bottomed. Inflation in Mexico is likely to decline, helped by lower demand and the peso stopping its free fall against the dollar. 
 Two types of market interventions since October, where the government sold dollars to ease pressure on the exchange rate, have managed to pull back the peso to levels of just above 13 per greenback, a gain of about 19 percent from its March all-time low.
    Ortiz also said the central bank is touching base with key market players to evaluate if a second auction of short-term dollar credits, aimed at triggering lending to companies once again, is needed.

                                       At the beginning of 2009, as Mexico felt the pinch of the U.S. meltdown, Finance Minister Agustin Carstens said the country’s economy was much better prepared than before to resist slowing business from its northern neighbor, where it ships about 80 percent of exports. 
    Asked about the possible effects of the U.S. recession in Mexico, he candidly anticipated in a TV interview in February the economy would only “catch a little cold instead of a pneumonia.”
    The phrase has haunted him ever since as mounting bad news — unemployment, inflation, industrial activity — show Mexico is not immune to the U.S. crisis.
    With Mexico officially in recession — GDP contracted 1.6 percent in the first quarter versus the same period of 2008 and could fall further in the current quarter — Carstens now thinks the economy may not grow again until the first quarter of 2010.
    In an affable chat with Reuters during the Latin American Investment Summit, Carstens also talked about measures taken to keep the peso from weakening further against the dollar but shied away from saying if, or when, daily dollar sales could stop.

It’s not just traditional western banks that are hurting — the recession is hitting Islamic finance hard, too.

The industry, which operates according to Islamic law and hence has an in-built conservative investment strategy, is seen as relatively insulated from the financial crisis. But some executives at the Reuters Islamic Banking and Finance Summit are not so sure.

Islamic finance should still be able to combat the crisis better than conventional banks but big problems loom if liquidity remains tight. In fact Sohail Zubairi, head of consultancy Dar Al Sharia, reckons they’re facing up to a crisis scenario that could include forced consolidation and layoffs.

“There is a real threat to the business of Islamic banking,” Zubairi told Reuters reporters at the summit in Dubai. “If the liquidity does not return, we will not be able to continue doing our business.”

Yousif Khalaf, head of Ajman Bank, thinks the situation is so bad that growth and profitability are off the menu for this year.

“What is more important is survival and, to some extent, continuity,” he said. “People want to make sure they survive.”

PHOTO CREDIT: A labourer walks inside Sheikh Zayed mosque in Abu Dhabi April 7, 2009. The mosque, one of the world’s largest, is named after Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan the founder and first president of the UAE who is also buried there. REUTERS/Ahmed Jadallah

China’s real estate sector has a chilly winter ahead, said Pan Shiyi, chairman of Beijing property developer SOHO China Ltd. And he had interesting, alphabetical way of describing it.

“I look at the shape of the real estate market and I imagine it bottoming out as a letter “L”. If after the snows earlier this year, China had loosed up its monetary policy, we would have seen a “V”-shaped market. If they had loosened up before the Olympics, we would have seen a “U”. But for them to release new policies now, like reducing the interest rate, it’s already an “L”. I don’t know when the market will come back up.”

More pressure will come to bear on Beijing’s property market, especially the market for lower-end, residential units, as projects built on land released for development in 2007 are completed, Pan said, speaking at the Reuters China Summit in Beijing on Thursday.

“Most developers are building common, residential units. As these units come onto the market, they will deal it a huge hammer blow,” Pan said, adding that China’s policy since late-2006 of promoting the construction of residential units of less than 90 square meters would soon be felt.

“This year in the fourth quarter, the effect of this policy will hit the market and reshape it…. The price pressure will be biggest first on real estate outside the fifth ring road, second on units 90 square meters and below, and lastly on those priced at 8,000 a square meter or more.”

By Lucy Hornby

“Well insulated” China, though suffering from sharp drops in its own equities markets, doesn’t have the sense of crisis that exists in the U.S., says Philip Partnow, managing director of UBS Securities Ltd in Beijing. UBS, the first Western bank to assume management control of a domestic mainland brokerage, points out the fact that what’s hitting companies is not subprime-related securities gone bad.

“I think there’s nothing here we feel is toxid,” he told Reuters on Wednesday at the Reuters China Summit in Beijing. He goes on:

“The Chinese capital market has responded quite differently than global capital markets and that is because the Chinese capital markets are still pretty well insulated by the way China controls the RMB and by the other financial controls that China has.

“It is true that both the Shanghai A-share market and the Heng Seng market have fallen quite steeply, but that is more in response to a correction from what many people believe was an over-inflated stock bubble, rather than a direct response from some financial crisis or concern. That’s been then followed on by some concerns that people have about a weakening economic sentiment in the U.S. and Europe and Japan, which are China’s key export markets, and what the knock-in impact will be in China. So there is also a fundamental concern.”

“But there is not a sense of distress or of crisis, or that things that people thought were valuable suddenly vanishing into thin air, along the same lines of what we’ve seen with some of the things that were happening with Subprime and the complex structures that were set up around the subprime, back in the United States. So I think there’s nothing really that we feel that is toxic, out here in China, so we are broadly comfortable with the businesses that we’re in. “

By Lucy Hornby

Walmex, the Mexican arm of U.S. retail giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc., is set for another tough year amid an economic slowdown that is making it more difficult for customers to buy anything from food to clothing.
In 2007, retailers were hurt by a downturn in the Mexican and U.S. economies. However, Walmex hopes that its first-quarter results will be decent. 
Listen to the company’s Chief Executive Eduardo Solorzano talk about the challenges ahead during Reuters Latin America Investment Summit. 

Ruben Iparraguirre, Chief Financial Officer at Banco Patagonia in Argentina, expressed his surprise over the U.S. government’s intervention to keep the credit crunch contained.

 During an interview for the Reuters Latin America Investment Summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Iparraguirre said the degree of U.S. activism was unexpected.

“We are surprised that the United States, which pushes free markets so much, has intervened so much now, that it’s done what it’s doing to save debtors who took on extremely expensive and risky mortgages, to save banks who loaned to those debtors, and to save the packagers who took those mortgages and resold them and designed them as junior, junior, junior bonds”.

As Mexico’s oil production gradually declines from peaks in 2004, future governments may need to come up with new ways to tax more products, like food or medicine, to keep healthy coffers, Deputy Finance Minister Jose Antonio Meade told the Reuters Latin America Investment Summit.
   Revenues from state oil firm Pemex currently bring government revenue to 20 percent of gross domestic product.

Many thought that with a sick neighbor, Mexico should have caught the blues already, right? Wrong. The Mexican economy looks like it is still growing at a good pace while its No. 1 trade partner, the United States, sails through choppy waters. 
   Central Bank Gov. Guillermo Ortiz told Reuters in an interview during the Third Latin America Summit that recent consumption, investment, industrial output and export data showed Mexico’s economic health appears sound, but inflation remains a concern.
   With Mexico’s average consumer prices currently hovering above the central bank’s comfort zone, Ortiz maintained expectations that inflation could range between 4 and 4.50 percent in the second quarter of this year.

Lawsuits over losses tied to subprime mortgage loans are expected to drag on for years, according to a lawyer representing institutional investors.

Salvatore Graziano, an attorney with Bernstein, Litowitz, Berger and Grossmann, told the Reuters Housing Summit his firm’s volume of cases suggests ligitation will last for a long time.