| Mexico City: a boom town since entering Nafta after the peso crisis |
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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.