The Bear of the Pampas

[don]

Technically, a technical default may still be avoided, but it is now unlikely. As the following presentation from JPM's Vladimir Werning shows, the market has already decided what the "next most likely big picture step" will be. The big question is what the less than big picture next steps will be. And as the following flow chart of options to all "potentially" impaired parties shows, there are quite a few possible steps as the variety of causal permutations has suddenly exploded. For everyone who has gotten sick and tired with following the sovereign default story of one Greece and Spain, please welcome... Argentina, where things are about to get a whole lot more interesting.


Next steps: A nerve-wrecking December for bondholders on all sides.




Risk of “technical default”: Where does it lie within the payment chain and why?




Risk of “technical default”: A payment chain is as strong as its weakest link














http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-1...hnical-default

[Shakespear]

Re: The Bear of the Pampas

I lived in Argentina and remember very well how they got skinned. In the end Argentina managed to find her way in the forest of wolves. Too bad though that they didn't hang or guillotine Menem, the biggest crook I had a chance to see stand on a podium.

One of the comments on Zerohedge

"Growth in foreign trade, especially trade with MERCOSUR partners, has been one of the main factors driving the Argentinean economy. Argentina is a major importer of industrial and computing machinery and parts, industrial supplies, automobiles and other consumer durables, refined fuels and lubricants. Main import partners are Brazil, European Union, United States and China. This page includes a chart with historical data for Argentina Imports."

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/argentina/imports

Oh hell, the next comment is even better

It's not hell at all XXXXX. In fact, the world bank stated last week that "Between 2003 and 2009, the number of middle class inhabitants has been doubled in Argentina, from 9.3 million to 18.6 million". It's all over the web.
I was there for a month last week. People are happy, aware of how lucky they are living in peace, going out in droves to eat amazing food, drink great wines from the skirts of the Andes and have a great time. Argentines are very social people. This is a country where folks are not desperately alone. Add a rich emotional life, good food, huge aquifers and tons of energy (just in shale oil so far: Vaca muerta, 20 some billion barrels). Argentines are aware of what they have. Yes, there are movements, politics at work, public complains. That is the nature of a true democracy, people have different opinions and they have the right to express them out in public, safely and without repression. Construction in B.A. has slowed down a little, true; and yet, it's hard to find a square block without something new going up. All bought on cash. In fact construction has had an amazing boom for the last ten years, all bought on cash. Without a doubt, it is a very rich country with a corrupt upper class (not all of them really, but most) of rich landowners (now complainers), secular agents of imperial world centers (London: 1810 - 1914, New York 1914 - [less and less] to the present) international banksters and (today) vulture funds, used to decide who was the dictator in charge. These, now increasingly jailed puppet dictators and international (especially media) corporations and their (let me say it again) local and international agents are fully aware that their time has ended. There is a new geopolitical situation in a country (a whole subcontinent) where it's past and recent painful history taught people a very hard (and well learned) lesson, avant-garde of what's happening in Europe today. Of course this is just an opinion, a reading. Regardless of "scientific" charts in techni/color carefully done by banksters [suddenly used as epitomes of credibility???] du jour we all see, read, perceive - and understand - what we can.