Felix's clips

First some stories I wrote for Euromoney and Latin Finance, some under the byline Mark Piper.

Can Brazil sidestep the tango effect? (Euromoney, September 2001)
This was the cover story of the flagship IMF/World Bank issue of Euromoney, a 400-page monster which is distributed at the IMF's annual meeting. It came with sidebars on the relationship between Argentina and Brazil, the crisis in Argentina, and a Q&A with Brazil's central bank president.

Awards for excellence (Euromoney, July 2001)
A large part of my job for Euromoney is the awards: deals of the year, borrowers of the year, that sort of thing. These are the biggest, for the best banks under various headings; I did the Latin America part. There were also individual country awards in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela.

The buy side starts to bite back (Euromoney, April 2001)
This was another huge cover story, written on the future of sovereign debt restructuring in the aftermath of Ecuador's debt renegotiation and in the anticipation that Argentina might default. It is very much in the tradition of Euromoney articles of old: long, exhaustive, the sort of thing which gets cited in academic papers. It had sidebars on Ecuador's restructuring and a legal device known as exit consents.

Ecuador pushes its trade lines to the brink (Latin Finance, June 2001)
Pushing my way into the secretive world of trade credit.

Stony silence in Mexican Brady market (Euromoney, February 2001)
An article about snafus in an important part of the capital markets which went unreported elsewhere.

Identity crisis hits party-crashing dealers (Euromoney, January 2001)
Even Euromoney has a lighter side.

Domiciled in the USA (Latin Finance, July/August 2000)
Why Latin companies like to be American.

Dot coms discover another Eden (Euromoney, July 2000)
Ah, those were the days: this was a story on Latin dot-coms. I can even claim I-got-there-really-early credentials with a June 1996 story on the advent of intranets in banks.

A quiet comeback (Latin Finance, June 2000)
The Latin American private placements market.

The road back (Latin Finance, May 2000)
Latin American syndicated loans.

Euroweek magazine asked for a trader's story on September 11: I found one.

I also had a little piece in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times on April 22, 2001.

I've written a number of pieces for Campaign, the UK advertising bible, including an interview with Tina Brown, an examination of the men's magazine market in the US, and small "medium of the month" columns on BBC America, Jump, Mademoiselle, Forbes and Access Hollywood.

One of my primary interests while at Bridge News was the development of a new fianancial architecture in the world of sovereign debt: ultimately, that interest resulted in the April 2001 Euromoney cover story. I was at Bridge when Ecuador became the first country ever to default on its sovereign bonds, an action which eventually resulted in a much-watched debt restructuring, the details of which I broke. At the same time, I wrote this two-part feature on it, and my interest in Ecuador helped me uncover a highly technical, but nevertheless scandalous, story about the country's credit derivatives.

I also wrote a lot about Peru, which was suffering from presidential resignations and having difficulty paying its own sovereign bonds.

I wrote straight news, as well, for instance covering the visit of Ecuador's president to New York, or getting rating agency Standard & Poor's to tell me just how worried they were about Argentina. I did my fair share of rewriting press releases, too, be they from the Emerging Markets Traders Association or from the International Monetary Fund, but I always tried to uncover the story behind the spin. And, of course, I wrote analysis pieces, such as this one on the uncertain future for emerging-market debt.

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