News Summary for October 11th, 2008

Could it get any worse... The answer is yes!
++ Meeting in Washington, Finance ministers of the seven most industrialized nations: the United States, Germany, Canada, France, Great Britain, Italy and Japan announced a five-point action plan to stabilize markets and restore credit flows to avoid a global recession, Meanwhile, the U.S. government was preparing to buy an ownership stake in a broad array of American banks for the first time since the Great Depression.

++ Managing director of the International Monetary Fund Dominique Strauss-Kahn, called for immediate action… He said the private sector cannot recover trust on its own, so he urged state intervention.

++U.S. President George W. Bush sought to instill calm. He said that “anxiety can feed anxiety” making it hard to see all the efforts being made to solve the problem. The U.S. president said problems were not isolated to the United States and the U.S. government was working closely with other nations to take coordinated and effective actions.
Despite these statements, world stock markets continued to plunge.

++ The Bank of Mexico auctioned 6.4 billion dollars to ease pressure on the peso, nonetheless, the dollar closed at 13.25 pesos and 12.10 buying… The euro sold at 18.07 pesos.

++ The Mexican Economy Secretariat rejected rescuing companies with liquidity problems after contracting debt in dollars such as Comercial Mexicana.

++The Latin American Department at the International Monetary Fund said that president Calderón’s anti-crisis program is a timely economic incentive to make reasonable use of resources.

Some good news...
++ UNAM is among the world’s top150 universities… In a year, UNAM went from place 192 to 150 in a list of universities, jumping above Holland’s Amsterdam university and Queen Mary university in England, according to the 2008 World Ranking of Universities.