New York - There’s a strange idea circulating among
Mexican currency traders. Well, more of a joke really. But there’s a certain
logic to it.
It goes like this: Instead of spending its precious
reserves to defend the peso, Mexico should just buy Twitter - at a cost of
about $12 billion - and immediately shut it down. The notion made the rounds
this week after the central bank revealed it had already blown through $2
billion of reserves in a largely futile effort to shield the peso from a steady
stream of anti-Mexico Tweets from Donald Trump.
“I would suggest they do it fast,” joked Juan Carlos
Alderete, a foreign-exchange strategist at Banorte-Ixe in Mexico City. “Because
Now, no one thinks this is really going to happen. And
it’s hard to imagine it’d be effective anyway. But that the idea was even
raised in jest shows how just how frustrated Mexicans are that their economy
and the value of their savings are at the mercy of the seemingly random musings
coming in 140-character bursts from Trump’s Twitter account. It’s a sentiment
that presumably would be shared by US investors in companies like, say, General
Motors or Lockheed Martin, but in Mexico, the pain, and the accompanying
despair, appear to be on a much greater scale.