Tag: Venezuela collapse

“Good News” From Venezuela…

Guest Post by Bill Bonner

POITOU, FRANCE – Here at the Diary, we walk on the sunny side of the street, even at night.

So today, we look at the bright side of bad news.

Accidental Healthcare

For example, yesterday we saw what a disaster the Nicolás Maduro government has made of Venezuela.

Consumer prices may be rising at a million percent per year… which must be hard to measure, because there are so few consumer items to buy. The shelves are nearly empty.

But did this ill wind blow no one good? Of course not.

Venezuela’s accidental healthcare initiative is a stunning success. As reported in Newsweek, last year, the average person in the country lost 24 pounds. That was after he shed 19 pounds the year before.

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Venezuela’s Future — and Ours

Guest Post by The Zman

There are a lot of ways to describe the new political divide that has emerged over the last decade. We have nationalists versus internationalists, globalists versus populists and identitarians versus the multiculturalists. All of those are true, but another way of thinking about it is that the debate is now moving upstream. For a long time, public debate was focused on economics or maybe politics. Those are downstream from institutions, culture and biology. Now, the debate has moved upstream, to the the stuff that really matters.

Not everyone has figured out that the debate has changed. The Bernie Bros, for example, are like the Japanese soldiers, who were cut off in the war and lived in the jungle for years, still fighting the war. The Bernie Bros still think the Democrats are the party of the working man, as if anyone in Washington cares about the working man. The legacy conservatives are similarly trapped in a bygone era. You see that in this post, by our old friend Sloppy Williamson, on the ravages of socialism on Venezuela.

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When Money Dies: In Venezuela, A Haircut Costs 5 Bananas And 2 Eggs

For Venezuela’s economy, the ascent into socialist paradise did not turn out quite as planned: in fact, under the Maduro regime, the country with the world’s biggest petroleum reserves somehow reversed course, and crashed through every single circle of economic hell, and now that its hyperinflation has hit levels that would make even Mugabe and Rudy von Havenstein blush, all that’s left is barter.

And, as Fabiola Zerpa explains as part of Bloomberg’s fascinating “Life in Caracas” series, i.e., watching economic and social collapse in real-time, in Venezuela, a haircut now costs 5 bananas and 2 eggs.

Read on for what really happens when money dies, coming to a banana monetary regime near you in the near future.

In Venezuela, a Haircut Costs 5 Bananas and 2 Eggs

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5 Ways Capitalist Chile is Much Better Than Socialist Venezuela

The story of Chile’s success starts in the mid-1970s, when Chile’s military government abandoned socialism and started to implement economic reforms. In 2013, Chile was the world’s 10th freest economy. Venezuela, in the meantime, declined from being the world’s 10th freest economy in 1975 to being the world’s least free economy in 2013 (Human Progress does not have data for the notoriously unfree North Korea).

Sweet Home Venezuela

Guest Post by The Zman

News brings word that things in Venezuela, over the last few weeks, have gotten as ugly as a West Virginia tailgate. Instead of people throwing bags of urine at one another, which is the custom in Morgantown, the locals are throwing “poop bombs” at the police. In the age of fake news, this could be a totally made up story, but it is not implausible. For some reason, flinging crap at people is something that comes naturally to people. I guess it is the ultimate sign of disrespect. Or, maybe some people just like throwing poop.

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Selling the Golden Goose

Guest Post by Jeff Thomas

Venezuela is a naturally rich nation. It’s ranked seventh worldwide for biodiversity and has the world’s largest reserves of oil. This is a country that deserves, more than most, to thrive. However, as in all countries, it passes through economic cycles and, when on a downward curve, would-be leaders take the opportunity to claim that the “greedy rich” have sent the economy into a tailspin (which can sometimes be the case) and that the solution is to adopt a collectivist approach to governance.

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Venezuela’s democratic façade has completely crumbled

Guest Post by Moisés Naim and Francisco Toro

A national guard member patrols a supermarket in Caracas in February of last year. (Juan Barreto/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/Getty Images)

Moisés Naim is a distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and served as Venezuela’s minister of trade and industry from 1989 to 1990. Francisco Toro is the founder and editor in chief of the Caracas Chronicles news site.

Today, Venezuela is the sick man of Latin America, buckling under chronic shortages of everything from food and toilet paper to medicine and freedom. Riots and looting have become commonplace, as hungry people vent their despair while the revolutionary elite lives in luxury, pausing now and then to order recruits to fire more tear gas into crowds desperate for food.

Surveillance camera footage shows violent looting take over a bakery in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas as the country battles widespread shortages of basic goods amid a reeling economic crisis. (Reuters)

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8 Lessons That We Can Learn From The Economic Meltdown In Venezuela

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

We are watching an entire nation collapse right in front of our eyes.  As you read this article, there are severe shortages of just about anything you can imagine in Venezuela.  That includes food, toilet paper, medicine, electricity and even Coca-Cola.  All over the country, people are standing in extremely long lines for hours on end just hoping that they will be able to purchase some provisions for their hungry families.  At times when there hasn’t been anything for the people that have waited in those long lines, full-blown riots have broken out.

All of this is happening even though Venezuela has not been hit by a war, a major natural disaster, a terror attack, an EMP burst or any other type of significant “black swan” event.  When debt spirals out of control, currency manipulation goes too far and government interference reaches ridiculous extremes, this is what can happen to an economy.  The following are 8 lessons that we can learn from the epic economic meltdown in Venezuela…

#1 During an economic collapse, severe shortages of basic supplies can happen very rapidly…

“There’s a shortage of everything at some level,” says Ricardo Cusanno, vice president of Venezuela’s Chamber of Commerce. Cusanno says 85% of companies in Venezuela have halted production to some extent.

At this point, even Coca-Cola has shut down production due to a severe shortage of sugar.

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