UK | Mexico Business Blog

Now that the United States is loudly breaking up with Mexico on social, Mexico is suddenly on the prowl for hot rebound trade with other markets. This is how it looks from here anyway, with Mexican officials popping up all over the media saying some country or other is going to be a big new market for Mexican exports. The new U.S. administration’s threats to dismantle the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) are currently stoking the flames of economic terror in Mexico, but we all know that Mexico’s dependency on the U.S. export market has been the stuff of economists’ nightmares for decades. To put it in perspective, the share of Mexico’s annual exports shipped to the USA has not dropped below 79% since some time before 1993, if it ever has. From 1998 to 2001, the concentration of Mexican exports destined for the U.S. market hovered near a truly bloodcurdling 89%. So it’s not like we didn’t know we were exposed to risk from overdependence on one market, but after 25 years of trade-loving U.S. governments, we became accustomed to living in denial. Continue reading Mexico frantic to diversify export markets for some reason →

We were positively gobsmacked when the news hit that the British electorate had voted to leave the European Union in the UK referendum held June 23, 2016. We should add that when new Prime Minister Theresa May subsequently named Boris Johnson Foreign Secretary, we were whatever comes after gobsmacked in the hierarchy of silly English expressions, but we’ll save that topic for another post. Not being stuffy pensioners in the Midlands, our prime concern over Brexit is the historical context for peace and prosperity in a unified Europe, and by extension the world. After all, the history of Europe is largely the history of thousands of years of uninterrupted warfare until the EU’s monumental attempt to pacify the region through cooperation following World War II. A handful of billion Euros here and there seems like a small price to pay for the opportunity for peace in Europe, but hey, what do we know here in the tropics. In any case, as British millennials figuratively jumped off the roof in the aftermath of the vote, we naturally began wondering how Brexit would affect us in Mexico, despite being neither British nor European.

Continue reading Brexit and Mexico →