Venezuela inflation will pass 700 percent this year.

[erudne]

Socialism Works: Venezuela to Pass 700% Inflation
January 22, 2016
Daniel Greenfield
12
has become worthless.

The International Monetary Fund says Venezuela inflation will blow past 700 percent this year.

In a note published Friday, IMF Western Hemisphere Director Alejandro Werner said inflation would more than double in the economically struggling South American country in 2016, reaching 720 percent.

Venezuela already suffers from the world's highest inflation rate. The IMF estimates that inflation here was running at 275 percent last year.

This is your country. This is your country on Socialism. The Bolivarian revolution has destroyed Venezuela. So Maduro, despite just getting whomped in legislative election, is running his emergency economic decree backed by a Supreme Court that his party packed. The newly free market legislature is defying him. Think Obama vs. Republicans all over again.

Venezuela's opposition said on Friday it would not approve President Nicolas Maduro's "economic emergency" decree in congress as it did not offer solutions for the OPEC nation's increasingly disastrous recession.

Maduro's decree, issued a week ago, would give the socialist government wider powers to control the budget, companies and currency.

But the opposition says he already has sufficient powers and insists he is the real problem.

Sound familiar?

Read More

 

[erudne]

Socialism Works Until You Run Out of Money to Pay for the Paper Your Money is Printed On
February 5, 2016
Daniel Greenfield
33
Bernie Sanders' economic policy over in Venezuela.

Millions of pounds of provisions, stuffed into three-dozen 747 cargo planes, arrived here from countries around the world in recent months to service Venezuela's crippled economy.

But instead of food and medicine, the planes carried another resource that often runs scarce here: bills of Venezuela's currency, the bolivar.

The shipments were part of the import of at least five billion bank notes that PresidentNicolás Maduro's administration authorized over the latter half of 2015 as the government boosts the supply of the country's increasingly worthless currency, according to seven people familiar with the deals.

And the Venezuelan government isn't finished. In December, the central bank began secret negotiations to order 10 billion more bills, five of these people said, which would effectively double the amount of cash in circulation. That order alone is well above the eight billion notes the U.S. Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank each print annually—dollars and euros that unlike bolivars are used world-wide.

This money is already worthless. Bolivars are running at 1,000 to a dollar. Doubling the supply just means they'll run 2,000 to a dollar or 10,000 to a dollar. Buying anything now costs at least 1,000 bolivars.

Venezuela's Socialist government had to buy its own fake money from abroad because it couldn't afford to print its own money anymore.

The central bank's own printing presses in the industrial city of Maracay don't have enough security paper and metal to print more than a small portion of the country's bills, the people familiar with the matter said. Their difficulties stem from the same dollar shortages that have plagued Venezuela's centralized economy

Socialism works until you run out of other people's money to use to print your own fake money.

That means Venezuela has to buy bolivars from abroad at any cost.

Which are often worth less than the cost it takes to print them.

The Venezuelan central bank's latest orders have been exclusively only for 100- and 50-bolivar notes, according to the seven people familiar with the deals, because 20s, 10s, 5s and 2s are worth less than the production cost.

 

[Stomper]

Hmmm.... the same is coming for a greenback near you!

Unlike people, math does NOT lie.

 

[ZA_Survivalist]

Yet all these idiot college kids think socialism is the greatest thing since free range, vegan, gluten free sliced bread.

 

[Stomper]

That's 'cuz they ain't the golden goose payin' for their rock n' roll lifestyles.

 

[Sgt Nambu]

^^^^Boy, are they going to just have a tizzy fit when tuition is $100,000 a semester!
'Course, we aren't going to be enjoying inflation in the hundreds of percentage points either! The Argentinians are already near slaves, thanks to the laws against saving, stocking up, er, I mean hoarding!

 

[kilimanjaro]

Another socialist worker's paradise fails. How many is that, now?

Let's see. Russia, check. Cuba, check. Poland, check. Czech, check. Bulgaria, check. Hungary, check. Romania, check. Baltic States, check. Sweden, going, going.... UK, going, going..... Venezuela, check. Nicaraugua, check. North Korea, check. China, going, going, thin ice..... SE Asia, going, going.....

 

[erudne]

 

[erudne]

Socialist Venezuela is Out of Food, Out of Power, Out of Hope
February 15, 2016
Daniel Greenfield
18
don't even have electricity.

Venezuelans are accustomed to severe shortages of cooking oil, diapers and other staple products. But those hoping to buy what they could find got a new unpleasant surprise this week.

They found malls dark and shuttered under a government electricity rationing regime.

"This is madness, this is not the solution!" said Nataly Orta, 48, at the locked gate of the Lider mall in eastern Caracas.

Authorities ordered more than 250 shopping centers to find other sources of power from 1:00 to 3:00 pm and again from 7:00 to 9:00 pm, for the next three months.

Also there's no food or medicine, so this just simplifies things.

According to figures published by newspaper El Tiempo, there is a shortage of 90% on staple goods such as flour, coffee, sugar, and meat, and 80% shortage in medicines.

Rosalba Castellano, 74 years old, spent hours this week in what has become a desperate routine for millions: waiting in long lines to buy whatever food is available. She walked away with just two liters of cooking oil.

"I hoped to buy toilet paper, rice, pasta," she said. "But you can't find them." Her only choice will be to hunt for the goods at marked-up prices on the black market. The government, she said, "is putting us through savage suffering."

"Our food rots without electricity, and it's sad because it's so difficult to find food here," said Mr. Chacin's neighbor, Sasha Almarza. "When we are able to find any in the store, we eat it all the same day."

Universal health care isn't working too well either.

In a hospital in the far west of this beleaguered country, the economic crisis took a grim toll in the past week: Six infants died because there wasn't enough medicine or functioning respirators.

On a recent day at the University Hospital of Maracaibo, in Venezuela's second-largest city, patients lay on bare beds in rooms with dirty floors. There was no running water, medicine, cleaning supplies or food. Feces floated in the toilets. Medical staffers there said gang members roam the halls, forcing underpaid and harassed doctors to lock themselves in the offices to avoid assaults.

"It feels like this hospital is under siege," said Dora Colmenares, a liver surgeon. "We urgently need humanitarian aid."

Socialized medicine. It's a killer. There are solutions, but Socialists only know one kind of solution.

The National Assembly, now controlled by the opposition, declared a food emergency on Thursday—an attempt to spur the government of President Nicolás Maduro to, among other things, ease price controls that have created shortages of everything from medicine to meat.

Maduro though is running his own kind of emergency. Venezuela's insane left-wing leader and former bus driver packed the Supreme Court to give himself infinite power even after losing legislative elections.

The country's Supreme Court gave Mr. Maduro special powers that allow him direct control over the budget and a freer hand in intervening in private companies.

Because the best way to fix a Socialist mess is with more Socialism. But you can't say Maduro hasn't learned anything from Obama.

Mr. Maduro has hinted at various policy initiatives. This past week, he opened a Facebook account. "I want to expand my direct presence on social media," he posted, adding two pictures.

The opposition just wants him out.

Venezuela's opposition said it will launch discussions Sunday aiming to devise a legal procedure within weeks to oust President Nicolas Maduro, whom it blames for the oil-rich country's economic crisis.

Prominent opposition lawmaker Freddy Guevara said on Twitter: "Tomorrow we will begin a discussion on the constitutional procedure for achieving a change of government."

Maduro and his cronies aren't going to follow any constitution. No more than Obama does. They're running a Socialist narcostate with a fanatical following. This is going to get ugly.

 

[PaulB47]

"If I had to point out the characteristic trait that differentiates socialism from [a proper view of the political economy], I should find it here. Socialism includes a countless number of sects. Each one has its own utopia, and we may well say that they are so far from agreement that they wage bitter war upon one another. Between M. Blanc's organized social workshops and M. Proudhon's anarchy, between Fourier's association and M. Cabet's communism, there is certainly all the difference between night and day. What then, is the common denominator to which all forms of socialism are reducible, and what is the bond that unites them against natural society, or society as planned by Providence? There is none except this: They do not want natural society. What they want is an artificial society, which has come forth full-grown from the brain of its inventor... They quarrel over who will mould the human clay, but they agree that there is human clay to mould. Mankind is not in their eyes a living and harmonious being endowed by God Himself with the power to progress and to survive, but an inert mass that has been waiting for them to give it feeling and life; human nature is not a subject to be studied, but matter on which to perform experiments."
-- Frederic Bastiat