Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.

Venezuela defends military buildup, accusing neighboring Guyana of granting illegal oil contracts

Summary: Over the weekend, the government of Guyana accused neighboring Venezuela of moving military assets, including significant hardware like tanks, near their shared border, and the Venezuelan government responded that they were doing so because Guyana’s government has granted what they consider to be illegal oil exploration concessions to ExxonMobil.

Context: This is a continuation of a feud that began decades ago when Venezuela started arguing that a significant portion of Guyana should belong to them, that portion of the country perhaps not coincidentally containing vast natural resource wealth; this topic bubbles back up to the surface periodically, usually when a Venezuelan leader needs to rile up their nationalistic base, and this modern iteration of the issue is being wielded by increasingly unpopular Venezuelan President Maduro, who recently banned his main competition from running in an upcoming election, and agreed to address this disagreement with Guyana peacefully; the contested Essequibo region is currently home to energy infrastructure that’s producing 645,000 barrels of oil a day, and this and other such assets are rapidly enriching Guyana’s economy.

(More info about the conflict and escalation can be found in this recent LKT episode.)

—The Associated Press

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Tear gas fired as thousands of farmers march on Delhi

Summary: Police are firing tear gas and deploying razor wire and fences to keep farmers, who have descended on the outskirts of Delhi in the thousands to protest crop pricing policies, from entering the city.

Context: Police have also reportedly fired plastic bullets at protestors, who protested in even larger numbers in 2020, dozens of them killed in scuffles with police over the course of a year, their efforts resulting in a promise from the government to establish a minimum price for their goods and to double their income—that promise, so far at least, has not been kept; traffic jams have already been reported as a result of this protest, though it hasn’t yet reached the scale of that earlier version of the same, which blocked highways leading to the capital for months.

—BBC News

US inflation, more stubborn than expected, edged down to 3.1% in January

Summary: The US’s year-over-year inflation rate dropped to 3.1% in January of this year, the lowest it’s been since June of 2023, but still shy of the 2.9% level that was anticipated by most forecasts.

Context: Inflation is continuing to drop in the US and in most other wealthy countries, but not as rapidly as many experts had hoped and expected, which led to a big stock market sell-off in the US on Tuesday after the numbers were announced, as traders hoping for a March or May interest-rate drop revised their models, some pushing back their projection of the first such decrease until later in the year.

—Investopedia

Investment index company MSCI is removing 66 companies from its China Index in the wake of a significant market crash—the highest number of index-drops for at least two years.

—Bloomberg

$350 million

Sticker price for one of ASML’s new High NA EUV chip-making machines, which are about the size of a double-decker bus and are capable of producing the highest-end semiconductors on the market.

ASML essentially owns this facet of the global semiconductor industry, and though most chip companies aren’t expected to invest heavily in these newer machines immediately, they’re expected to shape the market headed into the 2030s.

—Reuters

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