Coronavirus Pitches Mexican Economy into Battle Against Recession, Canary Ventures’ Brazilian Startup Program, Why Brazilian Airline Shares are Hardest Hit by the Coronavirus Panic, and More from Latin America...

“Investment is likely to decline once more, both public and private,” Barclays said in a research note.

“Economic forecasters anticipate the Bank of Mexico will cut its interest rates when its board meets later this month, especially since the U.S. Federal Reserve lowered borrowing costs by 50 basis points earlier in March” (The New York Times). 

“This assumes that the impact of viral outbreak peaks during the second quarter, and activity rebounds in the second half of 2020,” Ramos wrote in a research note.

Izabel Gallera, the Canary partner leading JetPack’s efforts, told Crunchbase News that there are “a lot of inefficiencies in Brazil that are much wider than in the U.S.”

“Here we could use a lot of technology to become more efficient. Even a little bit of technology could help gain a lot of efficiencies. In Brazil, we have much more explicit opportunities of building something that can solve a real problem,” Gallera said.

“In Brazil, we have tons of opportunities to tackle as we have a huge number of sectors that are either fragmented or low tech,” Toledo told Crunchbase News. 

“You may have portfolio managers with clients who want their money back now. Emerging markets are risky, and airlines are riskier than other assets. There’s not a huge connection to their fundamentals,”  said Stephen Trent, an analyst at Citigroup.

“Anytime that the dollar goes up, that affects (over half) of our costs… It’s not a positive thing,” said Eduardo Sanovicz, who heads Brazil’s airline industry group ABEAR. 

“Gol and Azul are super liquid shares, and they are being used that way,” said Azul’s CEO John Rodgerson on Thursday.

“The problem is that the more industrial jobs go to that part of the economy, the cheaper labor becomes in that sector, too, and the harder it will be for everyone to make a decent living. Brazil is losing good jobs that generate income and later pay people’s retirements. And there seems to be no plan to tackle that,” said Bárbara Castro, a labor sociology professor at Brazil’s Campinas University. 

“A tax cut would aim to encourage employers to hire those who haven’t had a job before and are often drawn into low-paying informal labor. Congress has until March 20 to ratify it.”

“The coronavirus only adds to that cocktail of ambiguity. Automakers canceled their annual car show in São Paulo, the largest in Latin America, because of high costs to take part. Had sales been strong, they probably still would’ve had to call it off because of the virus outbreak.”

“Under this policy, asylum seekers would not be held for any length of time in an American facility nor would they be given due process. Once caught, they would be driven to the nearest port of entry and returned to Mexico without further detention.”

“Back-to-back circuit breakers were triggered when the Ibovespa slumped 10% just 20 minutes into trading and then again when it hit the 15% limit down by late morning. While the benchmark index recouped some of those losses, the gauge was still off 14% as of 3:43 p.m. local time.”

“The government’s defeat in Congress was the final straw…It’s hard to say how long this sell-off will last,” said Jose Tovar, chief executive officer at Rio de Janeiro-based asset manager Truxt Investimentos, which manages about 13 billion Reais ($2.7 billion).

“The real weakened beyond 5 per dollar for the first time ever before backtracking and trading down 0.6% to 4.8468 per dollar. The central bank stepped up support for the currency by selling dollars in the spot market. Among emerging market currencies, the real is particularly vulnerable due to its lower carry appeal after interest rates fell to a record low.”

“We’ve divided the use of the resources in three parts, the first is for the health system… Second, we’ll need an economy functioning as much as possible, we need to promote lines of credit and guarantees,”  Finance Minister Alberto Carrasquilla told journalists. 

“We will not go to the market to seek more TES (treasury bonds), the resources of 14.8 trillion pesos correspond to what the country has been saving in the Oil Stabilization Fund,” Carrasquilla said.

“APIs are the building blocks that make it possible for both consumer and B2B startups to function. These APIs are increasingly essential to the infrastructure layer that supports technology businesses, especially in fintech and insurance tech” (Entrepreneur). 

“In Latin America, there can be hundreds of disparate data sources, many with unstructured data, that make creating these companies even harder than in the US. But those that win will likely have an outsized impact on the region.”

“Latin America is consistently one of the fastest-growing regions for e-commerce, and at least prior to the current COVID-19 crisis, economists estimated that in excess of 155 million people would shop online in Latin America in 2020. Yet many traditional payments gateways still reject international cards, use clunky authentication processes and struggle to process recurring payments. As a result, new startups are competing to streamline online payments for businesses across Latin America, but no one is dominating the region just yet.”