52-car-pileup kind of crisis. And sure enough, investors have fled like the country was on fire. On August 12, the country’s stock market fell 48% in dollar terms... in a single day. It took the S&P 500 about a year and a half to fall that much during the 2007-2009 global economic crisis. In the tech-bubble bust in 1999-2000, the Nasdaq needed nine months to fall that far. Even bitcoin took around three months in 2017-2018 to be cut in half. The Argentine market’s decline was the second-biggest one-day stock market collapse of the 94 stock markets that Bloomberg tracks since 1950. Every single one of the 10 biggest decliners that day on the New York Stock Exchange were Argentine companies. When a stock market collapses like that, a lot
conomic crises in Argentina are like hurricanes in Florida, or floods in Bangladesh...
They come around every so often and destroy the livelihoods of millions of people. And despite the lessons of the past, no one is ever prepared for them... They take a lot of time and money to clean up... And just as things seem to be on track again, another crisis/hurricane/flood hits. Most investors do everything they can to avoid economic crises. Crashing stock markets, plummeting currencies, and shrinking economies spell red for your portfolio. Right now, Argentina, Latin America’s third-largest economy, is in the middle of a
ONE STEP FORWARD,
TWO STEPS BACK
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October 2019
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