Venezuela Risks a Descent
into Chaos
At the main morgue of central Caracas, the stench forces everyone to cover their nostrils. “Now things are worse than ever,” says Yuli Sánchez. “They kill people and no one is punished while families have to keep their pain to themselves.” Ms Sánchez’s 14-year-old nephew, Oliver, was shot five times by malandros, or thugs, while riding on the back of a friend’s motorcycle. His uncle, Luis Mejía, remarked that in a fortnight three members of their family had been shot, including two youths who were shot by police. An economic, social and political crisis facing Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s unpopular president, is being aggravated by a rise in violence which is prompting fears that this oil-rich country risks becoming a failed state. “What can we do?” Mr Mejía asks. “Give up.” The morgue employee in charge of handling the corpses notes that a decade ago he received seven or eight bodies every weekend. These days, he says, that number has risen to between 40 and 50: “This is now wilder than the wild west.”
Critics say that the Venezuelan government is increasingly unable to provide citizens with water, electricity, health or a functioning economy which can supply basic food staples or indispensable medicines, let alone personal safety.
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Big Banks Use a Footnote to Look Smaller
Critics of bank complexity like this approach because it seems simple. There is no need for regulators to estimate the risk of assets. The banks just have to have enough capital, relative to their size, to weather those risks. You don't need to know how risky the assets will be; all you need to know is how big the bank is.
As poorer countries develop and the world’s population grows, emissions associated with food waste could soar from 0.5 gigatonnes (GT) of carbon dioxide equivalent per year to between 1.9 and 2.5 GT annually by mid-century, showed the study published in the Environmental Science & Technology journal.
It is widely argued that cutting food waste and distributing the world’s surplus food where it is needed could help tackle hunger in places that do not have enough - especially given that land to expand farming is limited.
To meet demands, the national oil company imports around 50% of its fuel needs. The remainder is then supposed to be imported by private fuel distributors.
But for months these companies have been reducing their imports leading to the current fuel shortages.
U.S. Oil Job Cuts Reach About 118,000
Federal Reserve Bank tallies losses in energy industry
The U.S. oil industry handed out 23,200 pink slips in the first three months of the year as companies began cutting their once-flush spending budgets deeper than in the ferocious mid-1980s oil bust.
The latest round of layoffs, including recent cuts by Chevron Corp., BP and Anadarko Petroleum Corp., has brought oil-and-gas job cuts across the nation to nearly 118,000 since the beginning of 2015. That's more than one in every five workers the industry had when crude prices began to tumble, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas said Friday.
You won't see job cuts bottom out until the middle of the year, if then," said John Graves, a Houston oil consultant who has tracked the industry's layoffs.
The dramatic and ongoing exit of more than a fifth of the industry's workforce comes as drillers sideline three-quarters of the drilling rigs they used to power the nation's biggest oil boom in decades. Analysts expect the number of active U.S. drilling rigs to continue dropping for the next few months, even after a recent fall to the lowest level ever recorded. Each U.S. land rig keeps about 30 oil field workers employed.
