Chávez watch: Banks’ help sought

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez is finally turning to the private sector to prop up the country’s increasingly insipid economy, creating a strange relationship between the bankers and a socialist government that continually threatens to nationalize them. Chávez is pressuring the banks to buy the $15.8 billion the government plans to issue in local debt in 2009. The money is essential to Chávez’s plan to prop up the economy in the face of falling oil prices. The president appeared to deliver a veiled threat when he restated plans to privatize Banco Santander’s local offshoot at the same time as announcing the new economic funding. Analysts expect bankers to comply with his demands.