South America

A Brazilian court has approved a bankruptcy protection petition filed by MMX Sudeste Mineracao SA, an iron-ore mining company controlled by Brazilian tycoon Eike Batista, the company said on Wednesday in a securities filing, Reuters reported. It was the third time in a year that a unit of the former billionaire's EBX industrial group has sought protection from creditors. The decision was taken by a court in Belo Horizonte in the Minas Gerais state. MMX Sudeste made the request after negotiations with creditors and efforts to seek new investors failed, MMX said in a filing on Oct. 15.

Grupo Oi SA, the Brazilian telecommunications company struggling with rising debt and shrinking market share, said the demise of an investment vehicle that owed the company's Portugal Telecom SGPS SA unit almost 1 billion euros ($1.28 billion) is unlikely to impact operations, Reuters reported. In a filing with Brazil's securities watchdog CVM, Oi said its Oi, Portugal Telecom and TelPart units will not be affected by the collapse of Rioforte, as the vehicle is known.

In the famous Big Mac index of global currency values against the US dollar, Venezuela makes a surprise entrance as the third most expensive place in the world to eat a burger, the Financial Times reported. This unexpected finding can be explained by two factors: the array of fixed exchange rates set by a country that has to import almost everything apart from oil and the rampant inflation that has pushed up prices more than 60 per cent in 2014. For investors in the country’s debt, it is not good news.

Although Venezuela has the largest energy reserves in the world, its deteriorating economy has forced Nicolás Maduro, the president, to slash imports to cover foreign debt payments amid a severe hard currency crunch that has already produced shortages of almost everything, from toilet paper to medical supplies, the Financial Times reported. “It is hard to believe, but there are worse shortages in Venezuela than there are in Syria,” said Moisés Naím, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

The main subsidiary of Brazilian tycoon Eike Batista's iron ore mining company MMX Mineracao e Metalicos SA filed a bankruptcy protection petition before a Brazilian court on Wednesday, Reuters reported. MMX Sudeste Mineracao SA, the unit that holds MMX's main mining assets, made the request after negotiations with creditors and efforts to seek new investors failed, MMX said in a filing. MMX Sudeste is the main operating unit of MMX and is developing iron ore mines in Minas Gerais state on its own and in partnership with Usiminas, one of the largest steelmakers in the Americas.

“We will not kick you when you are down, at least not for a couple of days”: that is the gist of a putative deal struck by 18 global banks this week, which agreed not to pull abruptly out of contracts with each other if one of them hits the buffers. As modest as that may sound, regulators see it as the foundation of a firewall to halt the spread of future financial crises, The Economist reported. The agreement concerns derivatives, contracts whose value “derives” from the performance of an underlying asset such as a share, currency or bond.

A year after the epic collapse of his industrial empire, Brazilian tycoon Eike Batista's financial and legal troubles appear far from over, Reuters reported. Once worth more than $30 billion and listed as the world's eighth-richest man by Forbes Magazine, Batista says his debts now exceed his assets by $1 billion and the value of his remaining stakes in the oil, shipbuilding, mining and transportation companies he founded continues to shrink. Batista also faces criminal and regulatory investigations into suspected insider trading and fraud.

The largest global banks will have to hold more capital and liabilities than previously reported that can automatically be written off in a crisis -- as much as a quarter of risk-weighted assets -- as regulators take on lenders deemed too big to fail. The Financial Stability Board is developing minimum standards that will limit the double-counting of capital banks use to meet existing international rules, according to an FSB working document sent for comment to Group of 20 governments and obtained by Bloomberg News.

The International Monetary Fund Monday backed a gradual exchange of government bonds around the world with new contracts to counter risks that holdout creditors could disrupt potential debt restructurings, The Wall Street Journal reported. The IMF, along with some investors and economists, have warned that U.S. legal rulings that forced Argentina’s hand in a long battle with holdout creditors could imperil other debt operations because they give a small minority outsized power.

Argentina's central bank chief resigned on Wednesday after a long tussle with the Economy Ministry and was replaced with a regulator considered sympathetic to the interventionist stance of a government battling one of the world's highest inflation rates, Reuters reported. The move drew a sharp negative reaction in financial markets, with the price of Argentina's local U.S. dollar-denominated bonds skidding.