Steven Palacio

As a Senior Mexico Economist and Chief Economist for Central America and the Caribbean, I am in charge of building a macroeconomic framework that allows to project a medium-term economic outlook for the countries under my coverage, which have been increasing over time. Currently, in addition to Mexico, I cover Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Panama. The outlook covers key macroeconomic variables spanning from GDP and CPI to monetary policy rates and exchange rates.

Daily responsibilities include tracking each country's main economic indicators and guiding clients and other lines of business within the bank on their investment decisions; that is, translate macroeconomic inputs into market investment decisions. Although I focus on fixed-income markets, I also deal with equity clients, as well as numerous corporations.

I recurrently write analytical research notes on most relevant indicators at a country level, while also producing research on global topics from time to time. As reference, in 2023 I produced over 200 pieces of the bespoken research, which reached a readership of over 350K.

My Mexico team has been persistently ranked within the top three Mexico Economics Team by Institutional Investor every year since 2013. I have also won multiple awards from different surveyors (Bloomberg, Reuters, Consensus Economics, among others) for top forecaster for different countries under my coverage.

I also give regular conferences to corporate clients or broader audiences and have an active presence in the media, but local and international. I also contribute to the economic policy debate at a country level. My research has been cited by policy-makers (including Banco de Mexico and El Salvador's President, Nayib Bukele) as well as by local media and international media, including The Financial Times.

For many investors I have become the go-to person for advice on each of the countries under my coverage. Such investors are key players in global financial markets.

During a brief tenure at ITAM university, I worked under the research group of Dr. Kensuke Teshima, a highly regarded economist in topics such as economic development and international trade. I helped Dr. Teshima collect and process data in order to then run several econometric-based models that aided him in the process of developing working papers. I dealt with large data sets, many times impaired in different ways, demanding rigorous data cleansing processes.

During my stay as research assistant I developed great analytical and econometric skills which would come to be an essential part of my analytical toolkit in my later job as a financial market economist.