Honduras

Honduras' CNBS regulator has banned the Central American country's financial system from trading in cryptocurrency and similar virtual assets, it said in a resolution, citing risks of fraud and money laundering, Reuters reported.

When Honduran President Xiomara Castro sent the bond market into a tailspin just minutes after taking office last month, it all seemed like some big misunderstanding, Bloomberg News reported. That same day, Pedro Barquero, Castro’s economy minister, rushed to clarify that she had meant to say in her inaugural address that the government should “refinance” its debts, not “restructure” them. This was plausible enough. Politicians not steeped in the intricacies of high finance have been mixing those two words up for decades.

Honduras’s credit rating was cut by Moody’s Investors Service after the Central American nation’s deficit surged last year and the government boosted sales of short-term domestic debt, Bloomberg News reported. Moody’s lowered Honduras’s credit rating to B3 from B2 today, putting the $18.4 billion economy in the same category as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Argentina. The move comes about one month after President Juan Orlando Hernandez took office vowing to tackle the deficit and as his finance minister seeks an accord with the International Monetary Fund.

Street surveillance cameras in one of the world's most dangerous cities were turned off last week because Honduras' government hasn't paid millions of dollars it owes. The operator that runs them is now threatening to suspend police radio service as well, the Associated Press reported. Teachers have been demonstrating almost every day because they haven't been paid in six months, while doctors complain about the shortage of essential medicines, gauze, needles and latex gloves.