The man labeled Europe’s last dictator by former US president George W. Bush’s administration just topped Dubya for gaffes.
Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko’s comment that Belarus might consider “restructuring” its debt sent the nation’s bonds maturing this year tumbling 27 percent, before he clarified he really meant “refinancing” and that investors should “calm down.”
“We are talking about a country where one man decides everything,” Viktor Szabo, who holds Belarus’ notes among the US$12 billion in emerging-market debt he helps oversee at Aberdeen Asset Management in London, said by phone. “The market is sensitive to what he’s saying. He is the policy.”
Szabo, who did not sell, is reminded of his native Hungary where the government of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban took office in 2010 and spent a couple of days warning of an impending Greece-like crisis before insisting the country was in no danger of default. Hungary’s bonds dropped 10 percent in the two days.
While plenty more presidents have misspoken, few blunders have caused such financial damage.
The US leader famed for Bushisms like “more and more of our imports come from overseas” told reporters in Japan that the two nations had been discussing the “devaluation issue,” sending the yen plunging before the White House clarified he meant the “deflation issue.”
After US President Barack Obama became the first African-American elected to the US presidency, former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi quipped that he admired his suntan. He told a German lawmaker he would make a great Nazi prison guard in a forthcoming movie.
Within the world of emerging markets, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was nicknamed Maburro in social media, a pun on the Spanish word for mule, for blunders like saying business owners “speculated and robbed just like us.”
He said his gaffes were deliberate to keep people listening.
“I don’t recall any recent incidents like this” one in Belarus, said Roland Gabert, an emerging-market bond manager at Deutsche Asset & Wealth Management in Frankfurt, which manages US$1.13 trillion. “It’s not a democratic country. If someone sees a headline like this, they would sell it first. If this happens in a country like Mexico, the implication won’t be huge. People would question if this is correct.”
CONDITIONS: The Russian president said a deal that was scuppered by ‘elites’ in the US and Europe should be revived, as Ukraine was generally satisfied with it Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing. Ukraine last month launched a cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, sending thousands of troops across the border and seizing several villages. Putin said shortly after there could be no talk of negotiations. Speaking at a question and answer session at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin said that Russia was ready for talks, but on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul, Turkey,
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