NEW YORK, March 6 (Reuters) – Venezuelan debt prices fell on
Wednesday as investors, who bid up prices in the months before
President Hugo Chavez’s death on Tuesday, took advantage of
early buying to sell into the rally, knocking benchmark bonds
sharply lower.

The country’s 2027 sovereign U.S. dollar-denominated Global
bonds were bid down 2.10 points in price, lifting
their yield to 9.168 percent, according to Reuters data.

NEW YORK, March 5 (Reuters) – The drawn-out decline of
cancer-stricken Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez spurred buying
of the country’s high-yielding debt over many months and his
death on Tuesday will likely cause prices to rally a little
more, investors and analysts said.

Investors foresee increasing potential for Venezuela to move
back toward market oriented economic policies and away from
Chavez’s socialist “Bolivarian revolution.”

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Lebanon’s small open economy is not expected to grow particularly fast in 2013 due to the uncertainty of the sectarian violence in neighboring Syria, economy and trade minister Nicolas Nahas said on Monday.

“GDP (gross domestic product) is $40 billion. Due to the Syria crisis and the effect on the (Lebanese) tourism sector, I think we get 2 percent growth in 2012,” Nahas said in an interview with Reuters.