Today’s Focus
It is a morning shaped far more by local data than by the overnight tape, which was a quiet drift lower. The Bank of Japan left policy untouched, Europe opened mixed, and US futures are barely changed — leaving Latin Americans free to focus on an unusually busy calendar inside the region.
The biggest cluster sits in Santiago. Chile publishes retail sales, industrial production, manufacturing output, and the unemployment rate all at once. Consensus expects a slight improvement in retail but deep year-on-year contractions in mining-heavy industrial production — numbers that will test the IPSA’s recent composure after it managed a small gain in Wednesday’s session.
Mexico gets its preliminary second-quarter GDP reading at midday — the first broad snapshot of whether Latin America’s second-largest economy is really running at the 1.3–1.5% annual pace that analysts expect after a near-flat first quarter. That number will steer the peso, which has been remarkably calm against the dollar.
Then there is Brazil’s budget. The National Treasury releases the primary surplus, nominal balance and gross-debt-to-GDP ratio at 11:30 BRT. A miss on the nominal deficit — consensus sees minus 133.2 billion reais — would test a market already dealing with an Ibovespa that has dropped more than 12% from its 52-week high and an inflation rate that is running above the target band.
