Videgaray – NRGI Broker Expertos en Seguros para el Sector Energético

From: Bloomberg / Eric Martin / 11 de Diciembre de 2017

Mexico’s top diplomatic and interior officials will visit Washington this week to discuss security cooperation with their U.S. counterparts at the same time that negotiators work to overhaul Nafta, according to four people familiar with the plans.

The visit by Mexican Foreign Relations Minister Luis Videgaray and Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong to meet with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on Thursday is a follow-up to meetings in May, according to the people, who asked not to be named before the agenda is made public. It’s aimed at coming up with strategies to combat transnational criminal organizations, the people said. The press office of the Mexican Foreign Ministry and the U.S. State Department declined to immediately comment.

The meetings coincide with a sitdown by negotiators from the U.S., Mexico and Canada to update the North American Free Trade Agreement at the demand of U.S. President Donald Trump, who says the deal is responsible for hundreds of thousands of lost manufacturing jobs in the U.S. In an interview last month, Videgaray said that if the Nafta renegotiation encounters trouble, it could impact other areas of cooperation with the U.S. such as security and immigration. Mexico this year has seen homicides surge to the highest levels of this century, surpassing the previous record levels of the drug war from 2010 to 2012.

“It’s good for Mexico that we cooperate with the U.S. on security and also on migration and many other issues,” Videgaray said in the interview in Vietnam on Nov. 11. “But it’s a fact of life and there is a political reality that a bad outcome on Nafta will have some impact on that,” he said. “We don’t want that to happen, and we’re working hard to get to a good outcome.”

Videgaray told reporters last month that Mexico is prepared for the end of Nafta if it can’t reach a deal with the U.S. and Canada that benefits the nation. The three countries in August began talks to rework the pact after Trump pledged during the 2016 campaign to overhaul or end it.

This Week’s Talks

The latest meetings to revamp Nafta, taking place at the Mayflower Hotel, will run through Friday, largely out of the spotlight. Cabinet-level officials aren’t scheduled to attend for the second time since negotiations began, and the Trump administration is preoccupied with efforts to push through tax cuts by year-end and avoid a government shutdown. Videgaray’s portfolio includes the broad bilateral relationship with the U.S., while a team led by Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo has been focused on the commercial details of the Nafta negotiation.

From: Bloomberg / Eric Martin / 11 de Diciembre de 2017

Mexico’s government on Thursday set out plans for a bigger-than-anticipated cut in public spending in 2017, with struggling state oil company Pemex earmarked for a 100 billion peso ($5.36 billion) reduction in funding.

New Finance Minister Jose Antonio Meade said the budget foresaw planned spending cuts of 239.7 billion pesos ($12.83 billion), targeting a primary surplus of 0.4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2017. It would be the first such surplus since 2008.

Of the cuts, 100 billion pesos fall on Pemex, which is already facing a funding squeeze and has racked up multi-billion dollar losses for years. Since the government ended its oil and gas monopoly nearly three years ago, Pemex has faced stiff competition from the private sector.

“Pemex is making the biggest contribution to the cuts,” Meade said, presenting the budget proposal to Congress a day after he was sworn in as finance minister following the resignation of Luis Videgaray.

In late 2013, the government threw open the industry to private capital to reverse a protracted slide in oil production, but falling crude prices have undermined those efforts.

Currently running at some 2.16 million barrels per day (bpd), Mexican oil production will slip to an average of 1.928 million bpd in 2017, the budget forecasts. The last time Mexican crude output fell below 2 million bpd was in 1980.

Still, the budget does foresee changes aimed at easing Pemex’s heavy tax load.

Less than two years remain before the next presidential election, and President Enrique Pena Nieto’s government is struggling to ramp up economic growth, having fallen well short of its original ambition to achieve annual rates of 5-6 percent.

Hurt by uneven U.S. demand for its goods, Mexico’s economy shrank in the second quarter for the first time in three years.

Next year, the budget foresees growth of between 2 and 3 percent, compared with 2.0-2.6 percent in 2016.

Despite the 2017 cuts – well above the 175.1 billion the government eyed in April – non-discretionary spending was expected to rise by 144.3 billion pesos, inflated by higher financing costs and a slide in the peso’s value.

Next year the government foresees an overall deficit of 2.9 percent of GDP, 0.6 percentage points less than the 2016 target.

The budget foresaw the peso averaging 18.2 per dollar in 2017, and an average price of $42 per barrel for Mexican crude, in line with the government’s hedging program. ($1 = 18.6600 Mexican pesos)

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Mexico to Discuss Security With U.S. in Parallel to Nafta