Market frontiers: Africa and Latin America

摘要

If you think that emerging market ETFs are the only way to access these markets, think again. Futures exchanges in Mexico and Brazil are now wired into the global trading apparatus, while structures are emerging in Ethiopia, South Africa, and elsewhere. "If you go back 150 years. Calcutta, India was more advanced than Chicago," ays George Ferguson, who 30 years ago founded an import/export business called Chicago Midwest in part to spread the understanding of markets in the eveloping world. "If you go back 20 years, Zimbabwe was the breadbasket of Africa," he adds, pointing out that Calcutta lacked free and open markets, and Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe scrapped his country's nascent futures exchange after the market began to reflect rising prices, while Chicago became the world's futures trading hub and the capital of the American Midwest. "I'm not going to sit here and tell you that futures exchanges create economic growth," he concedes. "But they are part of the equation." Ethiopian economist Eleni Zaude Gabre-Madhin won't argue with that. After three years of intense wheeling, dealing and lecturing, the World Bank vet finally got the Ethiopian Commodities Exchange (ECX) off the ground in April of this year and she believes it will help her country weather the current food crisis.