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.

Millions of pounds of provisions, stuffed into three-dozen 747 cargo planes, arrived here from countries around the world in recent months to service Venezuela’s crippled economy, The Wall Street Journal reported. But instead of food and medicine, the planes carried another resource that often runs scarce here: bills of Venezuela’s currency, the bolivar.

Argentina made its first agreement with a group of “holdout” creditors that rejected debt restructurings after the 2001 default on Tuesday, moving a step closer to regaining unfettered access to international capital markets, the Financial Times reported. The new government of President Mauricio Macri, who has vowed to normalise relations with the rest of the world, will pay a group of Italian bondholders $1.35bn in cash. That represents 150 per cent of the value of the $900m in bonds that Argentina defaulted on 15 years ago.

Embattled Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff called on Congress to approve a new tax on financial transactions and other potentially unpopular bills to balance the nation’s finances and reverse a deep recession, The Wall Street Journal reported. Ms. Rousseff, who is being targeted for impeachment by the lower house, addressed the congress in the legislative year’s opening ceremony for the first time since 2011, a sign of the high stakes for her administration. “Growth requires fiscal stability,” she said at the opening ceremony.

Brookfield Asset Management Inc has withdrawn an offer to buy the 24.4 percent stake in infrastructure company Invepar held by Brazil's Grupo OAS SA because Brookfield would not have full management control of the company, two sources with direct knowledge of the situation said on Monday, Reuters reported. Brookfield failed to reach an agreement with OAS's partners in Invepar, pension funds Previ, Petros and Funcef, over management control of the firm, said the sources, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.