Loading ...Article - Brazil Managing Crisis ‘Extremely Well,’ Pimco’s El-Erian Says
May 18 (Bloomberg) — Brazil is managing the global financial crisis “extremely well” and emerging as an engine of global growth, said Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive officer of Pacific Investment Management Co.
“People certainly feel the crisis is a major stress test for Brazil and that they’ve done extremely well so far,” El- Erian said in a phone interview from Newport Beach, California. “People are starting to take Brazil very seriously, not just as a stand-alone country, but for the impact it can have on the global economy as a whole.”
Brazil’s planned sale of 10- and 30-year bonds in international markets is part of an economic “maturation” that should also boost the savings, investment and growth potential of Latin America’s largest economy, El-Erian said.
“Brazil has broken out of the low-growth equilibrium,” he said. “The development of a complete yield curve in different markets is very much consistent with the broader secular journey we’ve been predicting.”
El-Erian, 50, returned to Pimco in January 2008 after leaving two years before to run Harvard University’s endowment. His Pimco Emerging Markets Bond Fund posted a 19 percent annualized return in the five years through October 2005, beating more than 90 percent of competitors, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
El-Erian made a bet on Brazil in 2002 that helped Pimco outperform most of its competitors in emerging markets, tripling the firm’s Brazilian holdings in the first half of that year as the country’s bonds tumbled on speculation of a default. The price on Brazil’s benchmark bond due in 2040 rose almost threefold to 117.6 cents on the dollar in the next three years.
He also serves as co-chief investment officer with Pimco founder Bill Gross.
Source: Bloomberg.
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