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Mexico City: a boom town since
entering
Nafta after the peso crisis |
Alberto Gomez gazes from his glass-walled office at the
manicured lawns of Mexico City's new financial district, Santa Fe.
"It could be Houston, Texas, couldn't it," muses the chief
economist at Banamex, Mexico's second-largest bank.
Against the mountain backdrop, elegant new skyscrapers glint in
the sun. Gomez is beaming. He has just helped clinch Citigroup's
$12.5 billion takeover of Banamex-Accival, or Banacci, as it's
known. Concluded in May, this was the biggest corporate deal in
Mexican history and the largest financial services acquisition in
an emerging market.
The Santa Fe district was once a sprawling waste tip picked over
for anything saleable by the poor. It's transformation is tangible
evidence of the strides that the Mexican banking system and the
economy as a whole have made after decades of financial crisis,
including the catastrophic peso crisis in 1994. ...
