Maybe this will be the last straw...
“This could mean the end,” says Sergio Silva, shopkeeper at a neighbourhood store in Petare, one of Caracas’s biggest slums. “If Venezuelans do not have beer . . . This country could blow.”
Venezuela is suffering its steepest recorded contraction in imports as the depressed price of oil, which accounts for 95 per cent of export earnings, has pushed foreign reserves to a 13-year low and raised fears the sovereign will default on $14bn of bond payments due this year.
“We haven’t been able to replenish inventory, and we only have malted barley until April 29,” Polar said in a statement published on its website. “Because of that, we are obliged to suspend the production of beer until we get access to the foreign currency necessary to procure material.”
The nation just cannot function without being able to extract 10s of $B of rents from the sale of their oil.
A new problem for Venezuela: “If Venezuelans do not have beer . . .This country could blow.” https://t.co/ds2T7prU9T pic.twitter.com/2GKccCZmd2— Financial Times (@FT) April 29, 2016
Washington and the Western financial sector has been trying to ruin Venezuela's economy for many years now. Washington is attempting to get the Venezuelan ruling class back in power so they can carry on lifting the country again like they used to.
ReplyDeleteThe Western powers want complete control of every country to fit them into its financial system. Then all the world's wealth channel through the City of London, Wall Street, and a few other western controlled financial centres.
This isn't really capitalism but a set up. The mega rich make as much money in their sleep. They can fix the game so they always win.
The capitalist propaganda is that every individual should work hard for success. That the failure to get a good job is down to the individual, who may failed at school, and then failed later on in life.
The propaganda works well and ordinary people are made to work incredibly hard by businesses, often more harder than is fair. Then they look at the underclass and despise them for not working hard enough.
The capitalists say they work hard and so they are not to blame for a society with a large amount of very poor people. They say the poor obviously don't try hard enough.
And so the terrible poverty that was once rife in many Latin American countries may return, where the poor no matter how hard they work will just remain poor.
That's the capitalist paradise, and the innocent libertarians have fallen for the propaganda of the 'meritocracy'.
@ nivekvb
ReplyDeleteBingo!
Ok so you guys are saying this is a big "xenophobia/neo-liberal/bankster conspiracy!" to:
ReplyDelete1. Collapse the price of oil (thus LOSING 100s of $billions of global oil investments...)
2. Thus render Venezuela without access to USDs to buy imports and in default thus losing EVEN MORE munnie on the USD bonds...
3. Leading to political instability and a return of right wing govt
4. Said right wing govt then borrows EVEN MORE USDs ...
5. Which leads to another default as they still dont have the USDs to pay these loans back...
6 So they lose EVEN MORE munnie...
When do these geniuses you guys are glorifying ever MAKE munnie in your world view????
You left out the step where the right wing government imposes austerity because Venezuelans have clearly been living beyond their means...
ReplyDeleteMatt, you left out the LOOTING.
ReplyDeleteThis is the way the system function. The only people that make munnie are those that extract it from the flow and the money creators keep the flow going as long as they can and when that breaks down, then the government steps in. Since the looting involves USD, that means the US government that the looters control.
It's a racket, pure and simple.
"Ok so you guys are saying this is a big "xenophobia/neo-liberal/bankster conspiracy!"
ReplyDeleteAgain, it's you making that up saying that others say so. It's a bad argument which doesn't get better through parroting. Or perhaps it's the non political technocratic argument, based on science, Voodoo science. Great stuff.
With a flexible exchange rate and freedom for financial account movements into and out of the country the worst aspects of this crisis would likely have been averted.
ReplyDeleteThe insistence on fixed rates and capital controls was a very bad choice.
In this regard Brazil provides a good example. Since 1994 the exchange rate has been floating and there are basically no capital controls. As a result the black market for dollars has been non existent for more than 20 years now and imported goods are always available and plentiful in the shopping malls and supermarkets.
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ReplyDeleteinstitutional momentum, pure & simple? interesting discussion here
ReplyDeletethe left/right ideology is just noise; there really is blind institutional momentum;
no different from the Hudson Bay Co. looting India ... just because they wanted to fund idiocy back home policies so esoteric even the perps didn't know what they were really doing
http://mikenormaneconomics.blogspot.com/2016/05/venezuela-now-out-of-beer.html
there's a Yin/Yang pendulum;
first the proles run out of beer, revolt, & their rebellion is betrayed;
then the "elites" run out of hot air, & turn on one another, & get slaughtered;
then the new-proles run out of new-beer, revolt in novel ways ....
then the new-elites run out of new-hot-air, turn on one another ... (yada, yada)
Ya gotta wonder if homo sapiens EVER wise up for long, or just find new ways to make yet-another-beer, pass out in yet another form of gutter, and end up back in yet another form of the same old cycle ... only this time on a bigger scale.
I'd ask the guy who coined "Socialism for the 21st Century" but he's unavailable.
ReplyDelete