Spain: Dismay Over Argentina’s Nationalization Plan - by Simon Romero

In a fiery speech justifying her decision to nationalize the oil company YPF, Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, cited her admiration for Petrobras, Brazil’s state-controlled oil giant, and other state oil companies in Latin America.

But in Brazil, Latin America’s rising oil power, and elsewhere in the region, financial experts greeted Mrs. Kirchner’s abrupt decision with dismay, saying the nationalization and other economic policies were making Argentina more of a hemispheric outlier than a leader in a bold new economic era. 

“Argentina’s capacity to err seems unlimited,” said Míriam Leitão, one of Brazil’s most influential columnists on economic issues, in an essay comparing the YPF expropriation to Juan Domingo Perón’s nationalizations in the 1940s and ’50s, which left Argentina hobbled with anemic state enterprises.

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