What Should Investors Know About Argentina's Upcoming Presidential Election?

Argentina is one of Latin America's most confounding economies. It is a country with stately, European style cities such as Buenos Aires and Cordoba and an export base that remains trapped in the nineteenth century. It has been said that in Latin America, Argentina is turning into Venezuela and Venezuela is turning into Zimbabwe. Argentina has many positive attributes but it remains a very challenging market for investors. While Argentina remains an important market for companies such as Ford and GM and has experienced rapid growth in e-commerce, Argentina has missed out on a lot of the positive economic trends under way in other parts of Latin America. Because of the country's complex political and economic problems, Argentina's large market of credit-card holding online shoppers hasn't attracted much attention from Amazon, Home Depot, and Wal-Mart, companies that are investing heavily in Mexico. To get a sense of what trends are worth following as Argentine voters go to the polls on October 25 I reached out to Carl Meacham, the director of the Americas program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a bipartisan Washington D.C.-based think tank.