Arturo Méndez heaved a sigh of relief after slapping about $300,000 in hundred dollar bills on the table to pay for a house. Carrying all that cash around the streets of Buenos Aires was now someone else’s problem. “Why couldn’t I have just got a mortgage like in any normal country?” asks Mr Méndez rhetorically — well aware that affordable mortgages scarcely exist in Argentina thanks to its chronically volatile economy. As a result, most are obliged to pay for their homes upfront, and often in dollars because of the historic instability of the peso, the Financial Times reported.

Traders reduced their bets on a default of Venezuela’s dollar debt over the next year amid a thin repayment schedule in the first quarter, Bloomberg News reported. The implied probability of nonpayment over the next 12 months plunged to 44 percent in January from 59 percent at the end of December, according to credit-default swaps data compiled by Bloomberg. That’s the first time the risk of default has been below 50 percent since September. The longer-term outlook is still a little murky, with the odds of a credit event over the next five years at 89 percent.

The recent bump in oil prices isn’t enough to help Petroleos de Venezuela SA as it faces its fourth consecutive year of declining production, Bloomberg News reported. The company’s crude output is expected to fall this year as it failed to raise cash for investments and after Venezuela agreed to cut 95,000 barrels a day for six months as part of a deal struck by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and other non-members to lift oil prices, analysts say.

Brazilian politicians inflated growth estimates to facilitate an agreement between the federal government and Rio de Janeiro to resolve the state’s financial crisis, raising doubts over the viability of the deal. The projections, even if proven true, would still leave the state running a deficit by 2021, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly, Bloomberg News reported. The deal was crucial as it sets a precedent for other states in financial difficulties.

Brazil plans to overhaul its bankruptcy law to help troubled companies survive a two-year recession that has led a record number of them to suspend debt payments, a senior member of the government's economic team said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. President Michel Temer also plans to announce new measures next week to increase productivity and bolster the construction sector, said the official, who requested anonymity to speak freely.

The fuel subsidies Latin American governments have used for decades to spread the bounty of natural resources are fading as the region’s largest economies shift toward market-driven policies, deepening public ire in difficult economic times, The Wall Street Journal reported. Mexico jacked up fuel prices by as much as 20% on Jan. 1 as part of an ambitious effort begun in 2013 to liberalize its oil industry.

The largest shareholder in Oi SA will oppose any alternate reorganization plan that does not come from within the debt-laden Brazilian phone carrier, which is struggling to emerge from bankruptcy protection. In a statement sent to Reuters on Friday, Portugal's Pharol SGPS SA said it will only endorse alternatives to Oi's original reorganization proposal if the carrier's board approves changes. The statement specifically referred to a proposal made by billionaire Paul Singer's Elliott Management Corp this week.

Brazil's federal government and Rio de Janeiro state have agreed on a package of austerity measures that will partially plug the financially struggling state's anticipated $8 billion deficit. The federal government offered Thursday to defer the state's debt payments for up to three years, in exchange for spending cuts and tax increases, The New Zealand Herald reported on a Reuters story. Finance Minister Henrique Meirelles told a news conference the measures would yield around $6 billion in total. They include nearly $3 billion in spending cuts.

Brazilian pulp and paper company Fibria dropped controversial language on a 10-year Green bond on Wednesday amid strong investor pushback, sources told IFR. Fibria was one of several companies this week to drop the aggressive terms, which make it easier for borrowers to breach covenants without offering investors compensation.

A thousand abandoned concrete huts dot a plain beneath a remote mountain range here in western Venezuela, surrounded by empty, rusting silos and irrigation canals covered with weeds. This is the Diluvio agro-industrial commune, built with $2 billion of Venezuelan capital by Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht SA, which last month admitted to giving out almost $800 million in bribes to secure contracts in 12 countries, including Venezuela.