Maia Mindel
@MaiaM
Macroeconomic analyst at Alphacast. Following inflation, activity, and trade.
Maia Mindel
@MaiaM
Macroeconomic analyst at Alphacast. Following inflation, activity, and trade.
MaiaM's insights
Hands-On: Tracking US Output With Alphacast
By Maia Mindel (mmindel@alphacast.io) Read more Alphacast Highlights here Whether or not the US economy will enter a recession in 2023 is a crucial question for most analysts, given the financial tensions observed over the last month, resulting from the highest interest rates in decades. Unlike most countries, that define a recession based on two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, the United States utilizes a different definition - one provided by the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, which determines the business cycle peaks (and troughs) based on a series of 11 indicators. You can follow those, as well as the unemployment rate (utilized, though not directly, by NBER) in this dashboard. There is further analysis of what signs these indicators provide for output here. Most of the data is available on Alphacast so far, in repositories such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the Bureau of Economic Analysis. However, unfortunately, a handful are not, and analyzing the complete breadth of data required is not always a possibility. Thus, this hands-on guide will show how to obtain the data from the FRED datasets, compile it, transform it, and present it - as it is in this pipeline. Given that...
Alphacast Highlight - What's the inflation situation in the Americas?
By Maia Mindel (mmindel@alphacast.io) Read more Alphacast Highlights here Latin America responded uniformly to the inflation surge, with varying degrees of success: Each country's price level responded to internal dynamics, but they all shared a common denominator: large monetary and fiscal stimulus packages in 2020 and sometimes even 2021, combined with surging international food and energy prices as a result of the situation in Ukraine, and global supply-side bottlenecks and disruptions from the pandemic and various global developments. Interest rate hikes over the past year have had an impact on price growth, with some countries proving more successful than others; at the same time, global financial conditions have affected and continue to affect the nations of Latin America in a variety of ways. Though prices already peaked in all countries, and February's figures seem to show inflation is on the way down in many, the degree to which efforts will not stall and the speed of the normalization of price growth will be crucial to determine whether Latin America can meet the challenges posed by the current, much more complex situation. Argentina has the highest inflation rate in the region, recently surpassing the three digit mark (102% YoY in February...
Hands On: ¿Cómo usar Alphacast para monitorear el financiamiento de PyMEs?
Por Maia Mindel (mmindel@alphacast.io) Más Alphacast Highlights disponibles en este link La economía argentina tiene una gran parte de su producción, empleo, y consumo destinado a Pequeñas y Medianas Empresas (PyMEs). Para entender su situación económica y financiera, especialmente considerando la escasez de estadísticas oficiales de alta frecuencia relevantes, es posible utilizar datos sobre su financiamiento. Para este tramo especial de la economía, los ECHEQs son fundamentales - y Alphacast cuenta con un dataset del Mercado de Valores actualizado en tiempo real de los mismos, discriminando según plazo, tipo de activo, y moneda. La complejidad del dataset, además de la cantidad de datos y variables disponibles, hace que saber procesarlos y analizarlos sea crucial para un análisis adecuado de los mismos. Por ende, en esta guía hands-on, se va a mostrar como filtrar los datos, transformarlos, y presentarlos gráficamente para su mejor aprovechamiento. Para esto, se va a utilizar el engine de pipelines de Alphacast para transformar y graficar datos de ECHEQs garantizados. Dado que la fuente está disponible en nuestra base de datos, la información se actualiza regular y automáticamente, al momento que se hace pública - tanto en el dataset original como en todos los usos. Paso a...
Alphacast Highlight - The US Dollar strenghtened in 2022. How has Latin America fared?
By Maia Mindel (mmindel@alphacast.io) Read more Alphacast Highlights here Through 2022, the US Dollar saw record-high appreciation in Q3 and early Q4, peaking at 18% YTD (DXY Index) - second only to the 26% registered during the Volcker Shock and its astronomical interest rates. However, the dollar normalized in November and December, finishing at a high rate (8%) but not one without precedent in the last 50 years. Over the first two months of 2023, the US dollar has continued moderating, showing a mild weakening though within normal historical parameters. The currencies of the major economies of Latin America have proven surprisingly resilient, since all but two countries outperformed the dollar in 2022. This stands in contrast to major currencies such as the Euro, which fell 6.1% YTD against the dollar by the end of the year. Some of the region's economies saw changes in line with inflation by the end of 2022, with Argentina showing a depreciation of 41% YTD and Colombia also seeing a large fall in the FX, of 14.7% YTD. Chile, meanwhile, also saw a depreciation, but a more modest one - of 1.2% YTD. The rest of the region's major economies saw appreciation in their...
Alphacast Highlight - How has Latin America FX responded to the US Dollar appreciation?
By Maia Mindel (mmindel@alphacast.io) Read more Alphacast Highlights here Through 2022, the US Dollar saw record-high appreciation in Q3 and early Q4, peaking at 18% YTD (DXY Index) - second only to the 26% registered during the Volcker Shock and its astronomical interest rates. However, the dollar normalized in November and December, finishing at a high rate (8%) but not one without precedent in the last 50 years. The currency of the major economies of Latin America has proven surprisingly resilient. With the exception of Argentina, where the FX felt 33% YTD, most currencies outperformed the Pound (-18%) or the Euro (-13%) and many of them even showed nominal appreciation: Uruguay (6.3%), Brazil (3.3%), Mexico (1.6%), Peru (0.5%), Chile (-12.3%) and Colombia...
Hands on tracking Consumption and Investment in real time
By Maia Mindel (mmindel@alphacast.io) Read more Alphacast Highlights here In this hands-on guide, we will show you how to use Alphacast Pipelines to create coincident indeces and monitor key economic variables. What is a coincident index? A coincident index provides a gauge for the movement of a key economic variable through the use of related data series. In this case, the coincident investment index mirrors two of the two largest components of GDP, Private Consumption and Private Fixed Investment. Since both indeces have a certain complexity, the methodology will be shown separately, though there are major similarities between the two. How to make the Investment Index In this case, we will show you how to create the coincident investment index. The index is divided in sections, which are weighed in accordance with their relevance to the variable at hand, and estimated using the latest available data for each. Given that the index uses the Alphacast pipelines engine and data available on the platform's database, that means that the Index will be updated to reflect it as soon as the data is uploaded in the Alphacast site - in a completely automated manner. The first step is identifying the data series...
Alphacast Highlight: 10 charts that explain Latin America in 2022
By Maia Mindel (mmindel@alphacast.io) Read more Alphacast Highlights here 1. GDP continued recovering, but weaker conditions resulted in a slowdown Most of Latin America's economies grew in 2022, a continuation from 2021 after the COVID pandemic caused the deepest economic recession in decades, if ever, for the region's economies. However, a combination of global tailwinds, mediocre fundamentals, and an exhaustion of the post-2020 bump meant that most of the region's economies saw slowing growth throughout 2022. The slowdown is posed to continue over the next five years, returning to the tepid growth that plagued the region over the 2010s. 2. High-frequency data shows worsening trend for 2023 Using a weekly economic activity tracker from the OECD, we can see that the region saw little improvement in 2022, and in fact worsened in the final quarter. Activity appears to be close to 2019 levels for all major economies, meaning that the boost to growth that the post-pandemic recovery provided to the region's main economies might be over. Consequently, modest fundamentals and global tailwinds might take over as the defining factor for 2023 performance. 3. The labor market recovered, but at uneven rates Unemployment surged in 2020, as a result of the...
Alphacast Highlight - Argentina December 2022 Macro Brief
After a decade of mediocre performance, with near-zero growth since 2011 and two consecutive years of recession in 2018 and 2019, Argentina suffered a large contraction in 2020 - with GDP dropping by 9.9% in 2020. The recovery, nonetheless, was quick, with a subsequent expansion of 10.4% in 2021. Growth is expected to remain relatively strong, with professional forecasters predicting GDP to increase over 5% in 2022, but with slower rates of growth in 2023 and 2024. The main indicator to watch is inflation, however, which has increased rapidly and in a sustained fashion since 2018, where it reached 45% - and has broken post-2002 records every year except 2020. Price growth in 2022 is expected to close at roughly 100%, and price growth in 2023 is not seen as likely to decrease, with a near-identical expected inflation rate. The coming presidential elections are expected to bring further instability to the economy. Activity Post-COVID expansion continues at moderate pace. The Monthly GDP Estimate for October showed growth of 4.5% YoY, although a moderate contraction of 0.3% MoM, similar to the previous month's figures. In terms of sectors, Hotels and Restaurants showed an extremely strong performance, with most other sectors showing...
