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

Venezuela boosts minimum wage by 43% to quell growing protests

Summary: Venezuelan President Maduro has raised the country’s minimum wage to the equivalent of about $100 per month—an increase of more than 40%—following a wave of protests throughout the country.

Context: This increase will be delivered as a monthly supplement of $60 and $40 in food stamps, alongside a base salary of a little under $4, which is about $70 more (all told) compared to the previous state of things; this boost was announced leading into an election year, the date of the election not yet scheduled, but Maduro is lagging far behind the opposition and he’s been pulling out all the stops to stoke nationalist support, including threatening conflict with neighboring Guyana, as there’s a chance he’ll have to allow the election to play out more legitimately than usual if he wants US sanctions on the country’s oil to remain eased.

—Bloomberg

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Africa’s biggest oil refinery begins production in Nigeria with the aim of reducing need for imports

Summary: A $19 billion oil production facility has come online in Nigeria, the country’s first privately owned refinery and the largest on the continent.

Context: This is being seen as a pretty big deal as Nigeria is one of the biggest oil producers in Africa, but its refineries are mostly aging and badly maintained, which has left them operating way below their potential max capacity—they’ve got oil, but not refined, usable petroleum, basically, which has left them suffering from a long-running energy crisis and costs them a fortune in oil imports; once at full capacity this new facility, which is owned by the country’s richest man, is expected to meet 100% of Nigeria’s gasoline, diesel, kerosene, and jet fuel needs and about 40% of its output will also be available for export.

—Quartz

China’s growth slows to three-decade low excluding pandemic

Summary: China’s official economic growth rate dropped to 5.25% in 2023, marking the slowest rate of growth since 1990, excluding the three years it was largely shut down due to the pandemic.

Context: Reports about China’s ongoing economic woes are increasing in tempo, and this new data is notable in part because China’s government is broadly suspected of fluffing its numbers to look better than they are, so this not-good number might be the optimistic, prettified-for-public-consumption version of a far bleaker figure, but it’s also notable because it’s arriving alongside other indications of stagnation like the country’s persistent decreases in birth-rate, and because of the potential this could mean China got big before it got rich, setting it up for an unavoidable, slow-motion collapse, which could have all sorts of implications for its next-step foreign policy moves and for the global economy, among other interconnect national, regional, and geopolitical variables.

—The Wall Street Journal

Over the past few decades, JPMorgan has become a deposits-laden behemoth, holding nearly 14% of all US bank deposits (which is about $2.4 trillion—a record sum) and pulling in not quite $50 billion in profit as a consequence.

—Chartr

$4.9 billion

Value of student debt the Biden administration announced on Friday that it will forgive, in addition to the more than $130 billion that’s already been forgiven.

These debt-forgiveness programs have and will impact something like 3.7 million Americans, and are highly controversial, with Republican lawmakers generally not liking them, while Democrats generally favor them, and in some cases support expanding them even further.

—The Hill

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