Paraguay’s bank collapse brought down a president – and exposed as myth the nation’s status as a ‘Dubai of South America’

the gist

On 3 November 2026, millions of Paraguayans using the Ueno banking app found they could no longer reach their money. Within days the financial crisis became a political one: President Santiago Peña was ousted, placed under house arrest and charged with corruption-related crimes, and Pedro Alliana took office on 6 November. Ueno, founded in 2021 as a digital lender and claiming nearly 3 million customers, about half the country's population, was put into resolution by the central bank on 2 November after accounting adjustments pushed its solvency ratio below half the legal minimum. A June supervisory report had already flagged about US$146 million in loans to companies linked to its controlling shareholder.

so what

The collapse punctures the image of Paraguay as a stable 'Dubai of South America' and asks who benefits from fast financial modernisation, who controls it and who pays when it fails. Close ties between a bank, regulators and political elites are a classic recipe for such crises.

fun fact

Paraguay shares the Itaipú dam with Brazil, one of the world's largest hydroelectric plants, and exports much of its electricity.

D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909)

the gist

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.

how it works

To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.

so what

A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.

the bigger pattern

Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.

fun fact

In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.

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