The interest rate that the Government of El Salvado pays for money from the Pension Funds is not more than 1.3%, while international investors are paid more than 7%.
Ricardo Soriano, Chairman of the Committee for the Defense of Workers Pension Fund of El Salvador (Comtradefop) reported that since the year 2006, the State has forced the Pension Fund Administrators (AFP) to invest the money belonging to Salvadoran workers in Pension Certificates, initially 30% and the 45% in 2012, money which has suffered a loss greater than $938 million each year.
During the VIII Petrocaribe Summit it was reported that the rate of interest on oil bills will be changed, increasing from between 2% to 4%.
The Guatemalan Vice President Roxana Baldetti, explained that Venezuela has modified the interest payment according to oil and oil supplies for more than a dozen Latin American countries. Guatemala's concern is so great that it no longer considers the agreement attractive and could move away from it.
These agents are intermediaries in mortgage management, obtaining advantages regarding both interest rates and contractual terms for their clients.
During the real estate boom in Panama, these intermediaries—people with good connections in the banking and real estate market—had foreign investors, generally from the U.S., as their main clients, assisting them in the process of obtaining mortgages for properties valued at over $200,000.
No matter what the cause, the old remedy for rising inflation was restricting liquidity with the increase of interest rates and a virtual paralyzing of credit markets, says César A. Garcia in a column in the Guatemala newspaper Prensa Libre.
Garcia continues: The President of the Bank of Guatemala, Maria Antonieta de Bonilla, announced in an interview Monday that the Monetary Committee will stop the rise in prices, which create an impoverishing rate of inflation of 12 percent per year.