Brazil’s real weakened after inflation surprisingly accelerated and as Goldman Sachs said the currency is poised to drop another 11 percent this year while the government struggles to contain consumer-price increases and shore up its budget, Bloomberg News reported.

Brazil’s real weakened after inflation surprisingly accelerated and as Goldman Sachs said the currency is poised to drop another 11 percent this year while the government struggles to contain consumer-price increases and shore up its budget, Bloomberg News reported.

Sete Brasil Participações SA plans to file for bankruptcy protection if state-controlled oil producer Petróleo Brasileiro SA, the rig builder's sole client, fails to present a final lease contract proposal in a week's time, three sources with direct knowledge of the matter said on Friday, Reuters reported. Both Sete Brasil and Petrobras declined to comment.

After winning a victory in its decade-long battle with a group of US hedge funds in a New York court, attention now switches to Argentina’s congress. Judge Thomas Griesa said on Friday that he would lift a controversial financial blockade preventing Argentina’s access to the international capital markets, the Financial Times reported.

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.

Creditors of Brazilian engineering group Schahin, which was snared in the country's biggest-ever corruption investigation, may reject a recovery plan in a vote at a Wednesday assembly, according to newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo. Estado reported, without saying how it obtained the information, that banks holding Schahin's debt found the plan to be unrealistic and ongoing negotiations to be unproductive. A Schahin representative had no immediate comment on the report.

After more than a decade of legal warfare, Argentina could be on the cusp of peace with its creditors. However, even if Buenos Aires does reach an accord with Elliott, experts fear the saga will leave a toxic legacy for the wider sovereign debt restructuring world that could linger for years to come, the Financial Times reported. “In many ways this stopped being about Argentina a long time ago,” says Anna Gelpern, a law professor at Georgetown University.

Over the past few days, the talk among those who watch "the most miserable country" in the world has turned to default, Business Insider reported. This year, it seems, is Venezuela's year. "Unless the Chinese pull something out of the bag or PDVSA [Venezuela's state oil company] exercises a voluntary bond swap it's happening," said Brian Dean, a partner at ACG Analytics. "There's going to be a default in my view unless there's some kind of political disruption ... They can sell assets but I don't know what they have left." The "default" calls have gotten especially loud over the last week.

Argentina has offered to pay $6.5 billion to a group of hedge funds holding bonds it defaulted on 14 years ago in a historic effort by the nation to put a bitter legal battle behind it, the International New York Times DealBook blog reported. Montreux Partners and Dart Management, two of the hedge funds, have accepted the proposal, which would pay three-quarters of a $9 billion claim on defaulted bonds, according to emailed statements from Daniel A. Pollack, a court-appointed arbiter, and Argentina’s finance ministry.

Azerbaijan has called for help from the International Monetary Fund. Nigeria is turning to the World Bank. Russia and Saudi Arabia are slashing public spending and considering sales of state assets. In Venezuela, where the collapse in oil prices has been even more devastating for the economy, the authorities appear paralysed. With President Nicolás Maduro locked in a power struggle with the opposition-led legislature, the best hope for Venezuelans may be for the country’s external creditors to step in and force a resolution — sooner rather than later, the Financial Times reported.