All you need to know about Venezuela's looming implosion -
'BODIES PILING UP'
The headline at ZeroHedge back in January said it all. “This is what the death of a nation looks like”.
It now seems inevitable that Venezuela, for decades touted as a “socialist paradise”, will disintegrate by the end of the year.
It’s the ultimate case of “Dutch disease”, a country now rotten from depending far too much on the export of a primary product and, as a result, facing a currency so bloated it can’t maintain productivity and competitiveness.
Now, the inevitable violence and chaos is starting to spill over. On Sunday, the Financial Times cited reports of the morgue in the capital city of Caracas overwhelmed with the stench of dead bodies piling up.
There’s been no official homicide data from Venezuela since 2006, but El Nacional is claiming “5186” murders in 2016 to date. One local think tank puts the rate at 92 killings per 100,000 citizens – about 22,000 Australians a year in local terms, or 84 murders every weekend in Sydney.
It’s almost fives times the rate in the year before Hugo Chavez came to power.
Spooked by a fresh wave of defaults at state-owned enterprises, investors in China’s yuan-denominated company notes have driven up yields for nine of the past 10 days and triggered the biggest selloff in onshore junk debt since 2014. Local issuers have canceled 61.9 billion yuan ($9.6 billion) of bond sales in April alone, and Standard & Poor’s is cutting its assessment of Chinese firms at a pace unseen since 2003.
While all 20 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg predict that the the main rate will be kept unchanged at a record low of minus 0.5 percent on Thursday, the Riksbank may extend its government bond buying program
For the Bank of Japan, it is no longer if, but how. Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda all but promised more easing in an interview with The Wall Street Journal Monday, saying, “without hesitation we would adopt additional monetary easing” if deemed necessary.
Goldman Sachs profit slumps for fourth straight quarter
Goldman Sachs Group Inc.'s profit slumped for the fourth straight quarter as market volatility hit the company's bond trading and investment banking businesses.
Goldman - the last of the big U.S. banks to release first-quarter results - reported a 56.3 percent fall in net income applicable to common shareholders to $1.2 billion, or $2.68 per share, for the three months ended March 31.
That compared to $2.75 billion, or $5.94 per share, a year earlier, when the Wall Street bank recorded its best quarterly profit in five years.
Analysts on average had expected earnings of $2.45 per share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. It was not immediately clear if the figures reported on Tuesday were comparable.
