Economists, analysts and the financial press that provides their viewpoints have been spending early May 2018 pointing to red flags they see emerging within Argentina’s economy.

Forbes contributor Kenneth Rapoza has an online piece with the provocative title “It might be time to get out of Argentina.” In the article, Rapoza quotes a Costa Rican investment advisor and a New York-based analyst with concerns about the country’s future.

“The [Argentinian president Mauricio] Macri administration needs to reaffirm [its] commitment to orthodox policy management and fiscal adjustment,” Siobhan Morden, a New York-based Latin America analyst for Nomura Securities is quoted as saying.

She continues, “The economic team will have to ignore the weaker confidence indices and resist any near-term political pressures of the opposition to delay tariff hikes. Argentina is vulnerable. It’ll be really important to manage market confidence with no room for any mistakes.”

The Costa Rican advisor, Fernando Pertini, chief financial advisor with Millenia Asset Management, says previous moves by the Macri administration provided temporary boosts to the economy but any advantages created may have run their course.

“I have seen all of this play out before: the government is using the central bank reserves to artificially inflate the peso and we have pesky high inflation,” Forbes quotes him as saying. “Argentina’s economic team looks lost,” he adds.

The article’s author Rapoza points out that the Argentine peso started 2018 trading at 18.40 to the United States dollar, but it was trading at 21 to the dollar on Thursday, May 3.

A columnist the with the United Kingdom-based periodical The Economist who goes by the pen name Bello points to similar concerns in a column posted online May 3, 2018. The U.K. columnist, however, also cites global economic considerations beyond Macri’s control.

Macri “has done a pretty good job,” writes Bello. “The problem is that stabilizing the economy is taking longer than the government had hoped and investors have become more reluctant to lend to Argentina.”

Also plaguing the effort, according to the pundit, is Macri’s setting of low inflation targets at a time when the U.S. Treasury is raising interest rates, “prompting investors to pull money out of riskier assets,” according to Bello. Thus, the spread on Argentine bonds has risen from 3.4 percent to 4.2 percent in 2018, leading to the Argentine currency’s depreciation.

The Economist author is not completely gloomy, writing that Argentine officials “are confident that inflation will now start to recede,” and that “they are also likely to try to placate investors by slashing non-essential spending [to] lower the primary fiscal deficit.”

The Latin America Committee of the Brussels-based Bureau of International Recycling (BIR) will meet Tuesday, May 29, 2018, at 5:30 p.m. in Barcelona, Spain. The meeting is part of the wider BIR World Recycling Convention, which takes place at the Sofia Hotel in Barcelona May 27-30.

Among the recyclers who have been involved with the Latin America Committee for the past three years are Alejandro Jaramillo of Mexico-based Glorem SC and Enrique Acosta of Florida-based BMB Metals.

Glorem helps source scrap materials in Central and South America and helps provide Spanish language services for California-based recycling software provider 21^st Century Programming.  BMB Metals connects scrap buyers, sellers and industry suppliers globally, with an emphasis on the Latin America market.

Previous BIR Latin America Committee meetings have included guest speakers from scrap consuming companies in the region and discussions of trade issues affecting the region.

More information on the meeting can be obtained by contacting Enrique Acosta of BMB Metals at enrique@bmbmetals.com. More information on registering for the 2018 BIR World Recycling Convention in Barcelona can be found on this web page.

Genesis Attachments has announced Rick Woodrum as its Mid-Atlantic regional manager. The company is headquartered in Superior, Wisconsin, and manufactures shears, grapples, concrete processors and specialty attachments for the scrap processing, demolition, material handling and offshore decommissioning industries

Covering West Virginia, Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia, Woodrum will provide attachment, parts and service sales and application support to the demolition, scrap and material handling industries.

Woodrum also will manage Genesis' dealer presence and activities in the region. He joins Genesis with 20 years of industrial sales experience.

Applied Materials Trading LLC (AMT), a plastics recycler and distributor, says it has nearly completed renovating the former Sunny Delight manufacturing plant in Mount Dora, Florida. Eight months ago, AMT purchased the 60,000-square-foot facility, which is situated on an 8-acre compound just outside of Orlando and sat vacant for nearly 10 years. The property will serve as AMT’s new headquarters beginning June 2018.

“It took a bit of creative vision to restore this property and bring it to its new condition, but we’re pleased to bring an environmentally conscious business—and numerous jobs—to this community,” says Casey Villamil, CEO of AMT. “As a business, having both a plastic and paper recycling plant allows us to service multiple scrap streams from our customers while giving them a one-stop recycling solution.”

The company, which is presently headquartered in Boynton Beach, Florida, says it invested $2 million to refurbish the old factory, which will house, shredding, grinding, pelletizing, dedusting and demetalizing equipment. AMT plans to add at least six new local jobs to its current plastic recycling team. 

Villamil formed AMT in 2012. It has since grown to become one of Florida’s premier plastic and paper recycling companies.  AMT says it anticipates the new facility will allow it to recycle 24 million pounds of plastic per year.

AMT also supports a pelletizing line in south Florida, where the company focuses on manufacturing low-density polyethylene (LDPE), high-density polyethylene (HDPE) and polypropylene (PP) repro for domestic and international customers.  

The women-owned company specializes in sourcing, marketing and distribution of polymers and also deals in bottle-grade polyethylene terephthalate (PET), preforms and other manufactured resins and recycled plastics materials. AMT services postindustrial plastic scrap throughout the state of Florida and ships to customers throughout the world. For more visit www.appliedmaterialstrading.com.

AMT operates its own fleet of trucks and owns a paper recycling facility in Apopka, Florida.