Financial Analysts and Latin America

This Bloomberg story helps sum up one difference between financial analysts and academics: the former seem surprised when historic trends don't go away.

Latin America is disappointing investors, economists and businesses with slower-than-forecast growth as waning commodity prices and strong currencies hit nations that failed to diversify and become more competitive.

The fact that Latin American economies are heavily dependent on commodities and have too little diversity is discussed, often in great detail, in every Latin American politics class in the country, and has been for many decades. It has been analyzed to death in too many books to count. It is essentially the starting point for any discussion of Latin American political economy.

So why are people surprised or disappointed?

I assume the people interviewed in the piece are paid very large sums of money to do their jobs. I would like to offer up my services--at a modest sum--to help you never be disappointed again by the strangely utopian views of Latin American economic growth that seem to pop up on a regular basis. A crash course in Latin American economic growth would help all these people tremendously.