Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Pessimism ???

This year the Colombian peso "COP" has been gaining value against the dollar, but in every magazine and newspaper that you read inside the country it says something like: "The dollar went down to $2.000 pesos for example, or the dollar went down $20 pesos..." and I can continue writing and writing things like that..
We all know that this phenomena is good for certain industries and disastrous for another's. For example, I'm being affected because of the revaluation of the peso, anyways.., my question and my post is about this: Why the concept is being written as something bad instead of something good?? A headline like this would definitively help:
"The peso won $20 pesos", or "The peso beaten the dollar in $34 pesos" should be used instead... even if it's not as good for some industries as for another's.
The conclusion here is that a positive writing produces a positive thinking inside us, while a negative writing produces of course a negative thinking.

2 comments:

Juan David Hincapié Ramos said...

The reason for being pessimistic about the peso "winning" against the dollar is pretty simple. The business activities related with exporting goods or services create far more work places than the import based ones. A revaluation of the COP against the USD would ultimately push the companies to improve productivity and reduce costs or to lay off employees. And as most of our export related industries are in the manufacturing and agricultural industries there is no much room to improve productivity. That equals unemployment in those sectors. Even worse is those are not highly qualified workers then it's harder to get them employed in other industries. Just last week the flowers industry from Bogota and Llanogrande laid off about 11.000 field workers.

Another bad consequence is that a foreign investor will need a higher amount of dollars to set-up operations in Colombia, creating a higher entrance barrier. And considering the also quite high inflation rate, the profit margin gets lowered and it's potentially not a good investment any longer. Which would mean that those work places don't even get created!

Those were my two cents!

Chao

Esteban 8A said...

You´re right about what you say, but you need to know that every single change that happens everywhere comes bundled with a double sided sword. In this case.., yes, a lot of working positions have been lost.., but I think that the reevaluation of the COP may lead to the adoption of an economy based in the us dollar, like it happened in Ecuador.., and that may lead to an equal situation for both sectors (import and export) finally.... And yes, that would make our economy dependent on the US economy...
Same thing happened in Europe with the Euro and the UE..

More on this later.