Mexico's Markets Wait, Watch and Worry
Here in the United States, the down-to-the-wire debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement follows the usual political game rules. One side gets a favorable headline one day, the other side the next. Players keep their cool until the last vote is counted.</br></br>But on one of Mexico City's most glittering boulevards, in the Mexican stock market's glass domed building called La Bolsa (The Purse), the ups and downs of this American pastime are driving people crazy.</br></br>"It's been a roller coaster, absolute madness," said Daniel Goldstein, director of equity research for the Mexican bank Grupo Financiero Serfin.</br></br>One day Ross Perot tells a rally of his citizens organization that the treaty is comatose and the Mexican market, full of NAFTA lovers, drops 20 points as measured by the IPC index, the main Mexican stock market barometer. Another day President Clinton coaxes another member of Congress into the NAFTA camp and the Mexican traders at La Bolsa celebrate a 20-point jump.</br></br>Last Wednesday the index soared 81.49 points on a brief upsurge of optimism brought on by nothing more than Vice President Gore's television debate victory over Perot.