Dudes, I’ve been telling you this all along but now it’s getting some official, bigmedia airtime. Here below is how the Reuters story kick off, but click through for the rest as it’s all good stuff. Meanwhile, for those of you versed in the language of Cervantes that want to get nittygritty on the latest numbers, this report from Farid Matuk is well worth your time. Meanwhile here we go with Reuters:
ANALYSIS-Peru’s hopes of being an ‘Asian tiger’ fade
Less than a year ago, Peruvian elites smugly began calling their country a ‘Latin tiger’ and predicted that it had entered a magical phase of constant economic growth that would outshine the rest of Latin America.
A leading minerals exporter, it grew every year for the past decade and capped off the heady days of 2008 with a 10 percent surge as China bid up global metals prices. But this year, Peru will be lucky to expand at all. The slowdown has been sharper than forecast and exposed the country’s overreliance on raw materials exports, with minerals making up 60 percent of all overseas sales. Unlike ‘Asian tigers’ such as South Korea and Taiwan, which boomed as they became manufacturers of everything from cars to microchips between the 1960s and 1990s, Peru’s economy still largely depends on the cyclical whims of commodities prices and exports have plunged 30 percent since December. Most economists say Peru will grow less than 1.0 percent this year, and the government appears to be backing away from its downwardly revised forecast of 3.0 percent…………..