Headlines

President Nicolas Maduro missed an opportunity to salvage Venezuela’s ruined economy on Wednesday with half-hearted measures that failed to reassure analysts at banks including Barclays Plc and Citigroup Inc. that the country can avoid default this year, Bloomberg News reported. Maduro raised the price of gasoline 60-fold to 6 bolivars a liter, still the world’s cheapest, and promised to devalue the official exchange rate to 10 bolivars per dollar from 6.3.

Global bitcoin exchange Kraken said on Wednesday significant progress has been made in the investigation into claims of creditors of bankrupt exchange MtGox, Reuters reported. In 2014, MtGox Co Ltd, a Tokyo-based bitcoin exchange, was forced to file for bankruptcy after hackers stole an estimated $650 million worth of customer bitcoins. Kraken was appointed in November of that year to assist Tokyo district court-appointed trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi in the bankruptcy investigation of missing bitcoins, receiving claims and distributing remaining assets to creditors of MtGox.

Rabobank, the Dutch co-operative banking group which operates in Ireland, reported a 20 per cent rise in 2015 net profit on Thursday to €2.21 billion in a rebounding Dutch economy, the Irish Times reported. The dominating factor was a fall in loan provisions of more than €1 billion, to €343 million, though Rabobank said that low level would probably not be maintained in 2016. Rabobank in December announced plans to shed 9,000 jobs, a fifth of its workforce, and sell as much as €150 billion worth of assets on its balance sheet by 2020 to make itself more resilient to financial shocks.

China’s central bank will increase the frequency of its money supply operations, with immediate effect, in a move to ensure there is ample liquidity in the banking system amid unprecedented capital outflow, the Financial Times reported. The People’s Bank of China is facing a tricky balancing act as it attempts to lower financing costs to support economic growth without resorting to heavy-handed monetary easing that could fuel capital flight.

The European Central Bank is expected to take further action to stimulate the eurozone economy at its next meeting in March, The Guardian reported. Minutes of the ECB governing council’s last get-together show that without an improvement in the outlook for growth for the rest of the year and 2017, policymakers are ready to cut credit costs further to boost bank lending. A risk that emerging market growth prospects will slow further and volatile markets refuse to recover from their recent lows will send already low inflation across the eurozone tumbling again, it said.

Concerns about the financial health of the commodities company Glencore have receded after its banks queued up to take part in a multi-billion-dollar debt restructuring, The Guardian reported. Glencore said its 37 main lenders offered up to $8.4bn (£5.9bn) of loans, some $3bn more than they had previously made available to the company. The offering was scaled back to $7.7bn and the refinancing process will be opened up to a further 30 banks in the second quarter of the year, potentially taking the total above $8bn.

Indebted Spanish energy group Abengoa needs 826 million euros ($922 million) of fresh cash to make it until the end of the year and a further 304 million euros in 2017, the company said. The engineering and renewable energy company could become the country's biggest-ever bankruptcy if it fails to agree on a wide-ranging debt restructuring with creditor banks and bondholders by March 28, Reuters reported.

The head of Russia's ailing state development bank Vnesheconombank (VEB) could be replaced soon by a senior banker from Sberbank, four sources familiar with the situation told Reuters on Wednesday. Three of the sources said the decision to replace VEB's Vladimir Dmitriev with Sberbank Deputy Chairman Sergei Gorkov could be announced as soon as Thursday. Government officials have been discussing for months how to rescue VEB, which finds itself saddled with toxic assets totalling over $12.6 billion and is at risk of failing to meet its debt repayments.

Mexico’s central bank raised the key lending rate by half a point to 3.75 per cent at an extraordinary meeting on Wednesday in an attempt to nip in the bud the prospect of rising inflation, the Financial Times reported. The bank — which followed the US Federal Reserve in lifting rates in December when it lifted rates by a quart of a point, and had been expected to stay in step with the US — stressed its decision was not the start of a rate raising cycle.

More than one-third of oil and natural-gas producers around the world are at risk of declaring bankruptcy this year, according to a new report from Deloitte, The Wall Street Journal MoneyBeat blog reported. Oil prices have plunged from more than $100 a barrel in mid-2014 to about $30 a barrel today. Yet just 35 so-called exploration and production companies filed for bankruptcy between July 2014 and the end of last year, Deloitte says. Most producers managed to stay afloat by raising cash through capital markets, asset sales and spending cuts. Those options are running out.