Venezuela

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.

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.

Venezuela’s opposition-controlled congress on Friday rejected an economic emergency decree proposed by President Nicolás Maduro to confront the deepest recession in the country’s history, the first time the body has moved against the government in 17 years of populist rule, The Wall Street Journal reported. The opposition legislators said that Mr. Maduro’s decree was vague and was designed to put more power into his hands without addressing Venezuela’s calamitous economy, which the International Monetary Fund says will contract by 8% this year.

The plunge in the price of oil is causing more investors to bet that Venezuela will default on its $120 billion pile of foreign debt, an event that would trigger a messy battle over the country’s oil shipments and deepen its economic and political crisis, The Wall Street Journal reported. Despite Venezuela’s worst economic slump since independence from Spain, the socialist government has continued to pay bondholders on time. President Nicolás Maduro this week reiterated the country’s intention to honor its debt. Few investors doubt Venezuela’s willingness to pay.

Late President Hugo Chávez won loyalty by distributing hundreds of billions of petrodollars to lift millions of Venezuelans out of poverty. The money has run out for his handpicked successor, President Nicolás Maduro, The Wall Street Journal reported. Less than three years into Mr. Maduro’s tenure, Venezuela’s economy is in shambles amid low oil prices, and poverty is more prevalent than it was when the leftist Chavismo movement took power nearly 17 years ago.

China will loan Venezuela $5bn to boost oil output, the Venezuelan president said in a televised broadcast from Beijing, in a show of continued support for the troubled Latin American economy from one of its main creditors, the Financial Times reported. China has lent $50bn to Venezuela in oil-backed loans secured under former president Hugo Chávez but has become much less enthusiastic about adding to its exposure as the Venezuelan economy has worsened. Venezuela is the eighth-largest oil supplier to China, primarily of heavy crude that trades at lower than benchmark prices.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will discuss “possible mutual steps” to stabilize the global price for oil at a meeting with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in China on Thursday, a Kremlin aide said, as both countries grapple with lower prices for their main export, The Wall Street Journal reported.

For years, Venezuela has had a hole in its pocket, a very big hole. The government’s complex currency system has led to exorbitant schemes by importers, who wildly inflate the value of goods brought into the country to grab American dollars at rock-bottom exchange rates, the International New York Times reported. Sometimes, they fake the shipments altogether and import nothing at all. Then they just pocket the dollars that the government provides, or sell some of the money for a gargantuan profit on the soaring black market here for American currency.

Venezuela will begin installing some 20,000 fingerprint scanners at supermarkets nationwide in a bid to stamp out hoarding and panic buying, which the government blames for long lines and widespread shortages of basic goods, The Wall Street Journal reported. The oil-rich nation has been selectively rolling out the rationing system for months at state-run supermarkets along the western border with Colombia, where smuggling of price-controlled goods is a major problem.