“One hopes the bulldozer manufacturers aren’t foolish enough to pull out. The Venezuela mass grave industry is poised for explosive growth.”
Of all the startling measures announced by President Hugo Chávez this year, from the nationalization of major utilities to threats of imprisonment for violators of price controls, none have baffled economists quite like his venture into monetary reform.
First, Mr. Chávez said the authorities would remove three zeroes from the denomination of the currency, the bolívar. Then he said the new bolívar, worth 1,000 old bolívars, would be renamed the “bolívar fuerte,” or strong bolívar.
Finally, at the behest of Mr. Chávez, the central bank said this week that it would reintroduce a 12.5-cent coin, a symbol of Venezuela’s prosperity in the 1960s and 1970s before freewheeling oil booms ended in abrupt devaluations, after three decades out of circulation.
Mr. Chávez champions these ideas, which will take effect in January, as ways to combat inflation, which in recent weeks crept up to 20 percent, the highest in Latin America. Officials blame “hoarders” for shortages of basic goods and price increases for food on the black market. Mr. Chávez says the renaming and redenominating the currency will instill confidence in it.
[…]
Inflation has been climbing rapidly since January when a sharp decline in the black-market value of the bolívar pushed up prices of imported goods. Since Mr. Chávez moved to nationalize major telephone and electricity companies in January, Venezuelans have rushed to take money out of the country, currency traders say. That exodus has caused the bolívar to weaken by about 20 percent to a level of 4,000 to the dollar on the black market, placing it among the world’s worst performing currencies this year.
The decisions to rename the currency and reintroduce the unusual coin, known here as the locha, a term thought to derive from an anachronistic practice of dividing monetary units into eighths, have dumbfounded many Venezuelans. More than a third of the country’s population of 26 million is under age 18, with no memory of the coin, which stopped circulating in the 1970s.
According to sources, Mr. Chavez will be meeting with officials from
Zimbabwe to seek advice on how best to accelerate Venezuela’s economic growth.
h/t
LOL !!!
economic advisors from mugabeland. priceless !!! (pun intended)
in a related news item, SETI investigators claim to have recorded what appears to be radio signals from a very very distant planet they have niknamed tralfamador after the vonnegut story, the content of which mirrors much of the human historical record on the highly predictable course of hyperinflation.
its a LAW people !!! as predictable as chemical reactions and gravity !!! you f^$@$%#k with the economy enough and it WILL rear up its billion hydra heads and proceed to DEVOUR all you have created.
I wonder of the good folks of Venezuela suffering under %20 inflation know that ol Hugo is subsidizing some American’s home heating bills as a publicity stunt?
Price of sulphur is going to go through the roof.
another socialist success story.
First Cuba, then Zimbabwe, now Venezuela . . . . wonder when Taliban Jack will fly in for a fact-finding tour.
The economic reforms have not born fruit and I see the great leader is into the second stage of despotism which is a doctrine of surreal hollywood-esque mass propaganda…controlling reality to the leader’s advantage….the filsm I’ve seen paint a utopian view of matters in the kingdom of the great leader.
Stage 3 will come when this lavish propaganda fails to convince the underclass that it is just their imagination they are missing meals and still impovershed amid a nation awash in resource wealth.
I wonder if the currency exodus will be followed by a human one. As usual, socialist lunacy hurts the people it purports to help: the ones who haven’t got much money and have to live with a diminished currency and job prospects, and can’t move themselves out of Utopia-In-the-Making.
That line about seeking economic advice from Zimbabwe WAS a joke, right?
Hugo Chavez is just another tyrants we should boycott his oil and drill in the ANWR and feed the eco-freaks to the polar bears
“That line about seeking economic advice from Zimbabwe WAS a joke, right?”
Yeah, a sarcastic one. 😉
Calling out Dr. Dawg!! It’s all Bush’s fault with the complicity of his stooge Harper, right?????? I mean Hugo is engaging in some intellectually pure socialism, it’s not working so it’s being sabotaged, right??? Can’t be the theory, the theory has worked perfectly in every ivory tower it has been applied in, has to be Bush, or the CIA doesn’t it??
time for Sasha Trudeau to do an article on the Herculean physique of Hugo. and next year once the economy has completely tanked Dr. Fruitfly can fly down and do a CBCpravda special on “substainable agriculture”
And who says socialist/marxist/communist dictators don’t know anything about real-world economics?
The best line came from the Zimbabwe link.
‘The bank’s solution has been to print more and more money, although the flow was temporarily halted last year when it ran out of foreign currency to pay for the paper and ink it needed for the bank notes.’
That was just funny!
Hollywood keeps making movies about how the CIA used to be this omnipotent entity going around assassinating South American Marxist Dictators with impunity.
Where the hell are they now? This A-hole needs a bullet.
Now now Warwick… wasn’t there a discussion about a week ago about how it isn’t good to advocate a leader’s death, even if it would serve the greater good?
Besides… alive, he can turn public opinion against himself. Dead and he turns into a martyr with all the standard cries “He MUST have been right if the CIA felt they needed to take him out”. I say, wait for his, errrr, “subjects” to realize that he’s wrong and to do the job for us, in the mean time, all his yapping just digs his own grave as it were.
“Hollywood keeps making movies about how the CIA used to be this omnipotent entity going around assassinating South American Marxist Dictators with impunity. Where the hell are they now? This A-hole needs a bullet.”
That would be cruel & unusual punishment.
For the bullet.
Warwick: “Hollywood keeps making movies about how the CIA used to be this omnipotent entity going around assassinating South American Marxist Dictators with impunity.
Where the hell are they now? This A-hole needs a bullet.”
Fred: “That would be cruel & unusual punishment.”
For the bullet.”
OK, folks. Who’s going to call the rcmp? Yeah, I realize these guys are too far from venezuela to do any harm. But the threat is the same as that written by the guy who talked about Harper. And if he they talk this way about Chavez, what might they do to someone closer to home? So, let the indignation begin! Let the calls to the rcmp begin! No? I thought not …..
If The Shill Fits
James Martin, writing in the Charlotte Observer, takes Joseph Kennedy II to the woodshed today for Kennedy’s acting as a shill for Hugo Chavez. Touting the beneficence of a tyrannical thug who is turning Venezuela into a police state is not something to be proud of.
” Former Massachusetts Rep. Joseph Kennedy II has been playing a strange game of political footsie with the virulently anti-American Venezuelan caudillo Hugo Chavez, who is in the final stages of turning a once-flourishing democracy into a South American replica of Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
He is willing to turn a blind eye to the repression of 26 million Venezuelans because Chavez ordered state-owned Citgo to donate millions of gallons of discounted heating oil to Kennedy’s non-profit Citizen Energy Corp. for distribution to low-income households.
Kennedy has been featured in Citgo TV ads running in 16 major markets touting the heating oil program as an example of a socially conscious corporation helping the downtrodden.
The ads show grateful elderly Americans bemoaning their inability to buy heating oil at “affordable” prices. Kennedy then steps forward as a shining knight of altruism saying: “I’m Joe Kennedy. Help is on the way …heating oil at 40 percent off from our friends in Venezuela and Citgo.”-snip
read the rest here…
3w.bluecrabboulevard.com/2007/03/19/if-the-shill-fits
h/t Maggies Farm
“But the threat is the same as that written by the guy who talked about Harper.”
Whoever was responsible for your education needs to be fired. Today.
This guy is one mad hatter on PCP. I wonder when his fans will catch on how really loony tones this walking dogma of the left is?
on a related note, for a short report on the number of new Hummers in Venezuela go here…. http://blogs.salon.com/0001330
as for the “great” Zimbabwean dollar, was it last year that it had 3 zeros lopped from it? to make it… you know, easier to keep it all piled up in 1 wheelbarrow…
and for an update on the number of murders and possibly the number of bulldozers required in Venezuela’s future, as good an expose as can be expected is here today…
http://caracaschronicles.blogspot.com/
18,381 lives lost to violence in 2006.
Where the hell are they now? This A-hole needs a bullet.
Posted by: Warwick at March 20, 2007 2:00 PM ”
youre in very esteemed company warwick, pat robertson voiced this view also. you know, the great christian televagelist once presidential wannabe.
Thank heaven, the NDP will never take power here,
The economic reforms have not born fruit and I see the great leader is into the second stage of despotism which is a doctrine of surreal hollywood-esque mass propaganda…controlling reality to the leader’s advantage….the filsm I’ve seen paint a utopian view of matters in the kingdom of the great leader.
Stage 3 will come when this lavish propaganda fails to convince the underclass that it is just their imagination they are missing meals and still impovershed amid a nation awash in resource wealth.
Ha ha ha ha! Sounds like a Conservative pre-election speech. Venezuelans is sooooo stoopid!
Ah, you guys do realize that there’s no difference between the policies of Dear Hugo and Dear Stephen, except for the relative speed at which Huge-o is destroying his economy? Welfare is welfare, and taxed and regulated industries are as good as nationalized.
Oh wait, I forgot. Everything that I buy except for DVD players aren’t skyrocketing in price, it’s just that speculators and greedy Arabs are putting too many darn zeroes on everything. Harper isn’t pouring money into leftist boondoggles, he’s fighting “real pollution”. He isn’t buying votes he’s “restoring fiscal balance”. And those ads I’m hearing every 10 minutes on the radio aren’t lavish propaganda, they’re merely timely reminders of the wisdom, wealth and benevolence of the federal government. Forgive me.
i Harper isn’t pouring money into leftist boondoggles
Harpur has stolen the Lieberal thunder!!
“Ah, you guys do realize that there’s no difference between the policies of Dear Hugo and Dear Stephen”
Wow! You make as much sense as Dion, and I assume you’re english.
Hugo is great! Building hospitals, clinics, and spas for seniors, bridges and subways by the dozen.
see; Oilwars.blogspot.com
Poor Hugo, may not see the bite coming to his governing wallet. All the medical and engineering staff are going to get their uncles and cousins *IN* and the wage balloon is coming like a tidal wave.
Surprise! = TG
just curious, are these the same bulldozers put to use in chile in the 70s and 80s under pinoshit?