Topic: Venezuela hit by new nationwide powercut for more than three days - page 3. (Read 894 times)

No, Venezuela was broken by socialist policies: Pegging the USD to an arbitrary value "to stop inflation", which was in effect a subsidy favoring imported goods and hurting local production; massive intervention by the state seizing investments, property and production or fixing prices by decree made most of the private sector bankrupt, and what the State owned or seized from bankrupt companies, was left to rot as well. Expenditure... insane money waste, often lost in corruption (ie. Odebrecht), disguised as social programs when oil prices were high. Now that they are low, they kept the same or even increased the expenditure, since they were in red unable pay wages they ordered the Central bank to add zeroes to the State accounts (because printing actual banknotes is too expensive) and we were forced into a cashless nation overnight due to their own induced inflation.

By the time the US started "sanctions" in say, 2017; 95% of the harm was already done. In theory, these "sanctions" are aimed to give the final blow that would topple the de-facto gov, but the regime seems completely oblivious to them and the (bad) situation remains unchanged (its getting worse with or without sanctions).


The amount of USD money circulating is rather limited, and this is also making inflation in USD prices as well. Imported goods are starting to be much more expensive than abroad, which makes it tricky for most people who earn under 5 USD a month.

Bitcoin is ideal to escape inflation, but as correctly pointed few people can afford them. There is a group of wealthy people often abroad trading with them as this is one of the only ways to safely move capital from and to the country with draconian controls.

I don't think that is true. Venezuela still amounts to less than 1% of the exchange volumes and I really doubt whether the people there can actually afford purchasing Bitcoins. As far as I have heard, the US Dollar banknotes remains as the primary method of wealth storage (although the government is going all out to stop this practice).

In fact this is nothing new, we have seen crisis like the one that is striking Venezuela many times before which is what makes this even sadder, economist all over the world have warned that something like this was going to happen eventually to Venezuela and the leaders did not listen to them and now all the population of the country is paying the price for decisions that they did not took themselves.

it is true that in Venezuela the economy was hit by a terrible economic crisis, but from an incident like this it should be used to study so that it does not repeat itself in other countries because there are already examples of countries destroyed by an irregular economy.

Let's be realistic a bit here, right?
Think of the one dollar bill and how much cotton can be in it, (as it weighs 1 gram), then think that if the cotton is more expensive than 1$ per gram it should be around 1000$ per kilo.
A pair of socks or underwear that are made of cotton would cost from 60 to 120$.
Or more than the average weekly wage of more than half the world.

In reality, cotton prices are at around 1.5$ per kilo, so you can buy half of it with one bill:P

No, what happened in Venezuela is that they tried to print small bills that would have no value whatsoever.
For example, a one yen bill would also be counterproductive, and Japan can't really be compared to Venezuela in terms of inflations.

And funny enough, we run into this problem with cryptos also.
Remember the spam wave in early 2018?
If you had dust sitting in a lot of addresses it would cost you more to send that dust than it was worth it

I think this whole process has to be analyzed in context with US sanctions. The 2017 economic collapse came just after 1 year of US sanctions.

I don't know how much of the collapse is due to internal policies and how much of it is due to the fact that anyone who does business with the USA cannot legally do business with Venezuela.

You can probably destroy any emerging market economy with this kind of sanction regardless of ideology.

Inflation is not declining, its increasing. Socialist mindset in the economy destroyed the nation's means of income. Venezuela's economy has been declining for the last decade, especially during the last 6 years when Maduro seized power:


The powercuts? An entire month has been lost already. Most places in Venezuela keep getting blackouts (and that also damages things), they only spared the capital from power rationing from fears of a popular revolt getting out of hand...

 This is really a sad news. Minimized power supply will cause a lot of difficulties in everything. The economy will go down because many technologies are not working well and people's lives are lower.
venezuela needs a better leader and helps their country on the right track. Inflation is expected to decline significantly in the next few years for Venezuela.

Venezuela is in all sorts of trouble these days and I think united nation should act and give some peace / relief to the citizens of Venezuela.




Venezuela is perfect example of where the economy is in serve pressure and their local fiat currency has lost its value completely. Also you can find that almost everyone in Venezuela has invested in bitcoins and the rate of bitcoin in Venezuela is far more than the normal rate else where.

You can be sure it has nothing to do with crypto and vice versa. All the crises that occur there are purely from an economic failure that is even getting worse. Venezuela is currently not in need of assistance with "crypto" tags or the like. They need real economic help

Being a socialist country, Venezuela is having very few allies. They include Russia and Cuba. But Cuba is in no position to help, and Russia is too busy dealing with the issues around its borders (Ukraine, North Korea.etc). Perhaps the Venezuelans would have been in a better position now, had they spent their petro-dollars carefully during the boom years (2010-14).

The country can recover quickly by abandoning socialist economy practices and embracing a free market economy. There is a ton of money out there waiting for a government change, since there is so much to do to rebuild the nation.

Selling the gold is like selling your bitcoin, you are burning your savings. This is very bad, its supposed to be the national reserves. Perhaps a future government will buy it back again, or perhaps it will see the light buy bitcoin instead as well...

Thanks to corruption by socialism, too much has been lost. The price is the current poverty and misery of the people. Once the market is free, and the country is made safe, many investors will come and jobs will rise, among with wages. As long as the State remains out of the way or give incentives.

I'm happy if thats the case, but I think the costs might be ignoring some of the subsidies given to the producers who supply cotton.   I'll try to get a source on that.
Really its analogy for the greater costs to the circulation of dollar and its false accounting to value but all the same I'll look it up.    If its wasn't a deceptive topic the Venezuela authorities and many other countries who went the same path would not have been able to get away with it for so long.  There is definitely a correlation


Ok found some reference for the idea but will look for something more specific

absolutely right and hopefully the country can recover as soon as possible because the community has suffered from the economy for quite a long time because the country was hit by severe inflation

The FED isn't agreeing with you:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12771.htm

No country is really superior on this point at present.   Even in USA the costs of producing a 1 dollar note exceeds the value exchangable for that note.   People might say that note doesnt matter, most dollars are never printed; but its representative of the global economy doing similar to Venezuela which is to over produce note which have negliable value but are substitute for proper fiscal budgeting.  
Venezuela is the extreme example but its an effect in action all over the world.  Especially Japan is a country where the government is bankrupt while the nation is not and they are in theory democratic, its a destabilising force.   I think its a storm coming to us all

The financial crisis there is something the civilized world has never seen before and all because of the collapse of their fiat system.
They are considering it trash as much to even throwing it in the streets to just show how worthless it is to them.

At this very moment there are nationwide spread blackouts, they are rationing everywhere but Caracas, because in Caracas things started getting tense with protests and the regime got really scared when there were demoing in front of the palace, something not seen since April 2002.



Also many parts of Caracas have been without water for more than a month, which fueled the protests.

All of this has to do with socialism. Socialism is about the State owning the means of productions, so they "nationalized" many companies, including basic services such as electricity, water and telephony. Next, they neglected them, cutting their budgets so low things started breaking all over the place. They are a monopoly, its not like we can choose to go to a different company. They destroyed the free market economy and replaced with a dysfunctional "central planned economy". They didn't outright ban private business but those few that remain are so draconionly regulated most go bankrupt anyway (and they are happy with that) and next they are not replaced by anything.

We used produce 80% of everything we ate, but now the de facto regime imports 90%, distributed to those fortunate enough to have both a special "Fatherland card" AND have a designated (honest) delegate in the zone they live in... The box is (supposed) to be given once a month, and contains things like: 1ltr cooking oil, 250gr mayo, 250gr ketchup, 2kg pasta, 2kg beans, 2kg rice, 1kg powder milk.

When you are supposed to feed a family for a whole month with just that... Well i hope you can start to understand socialism true face. And thanks to hyperinflation, a wage is about 5 USD a month. You can now buy imported goods, but they have international prices, or even higher in USD equivalent.

The net result socialism produces: Poverty like never seen before, and a new super rich elite that is closely tied to the regime leadership. Oh and don't get me started with corruption, when you replace the free market with bureaucrats to decide who eats and who doesn't, you can imagine what people are forced to do for eating... Since you are no longer able to start a business or work for others, the human entrepreneurial habit is replaced with a criminal type, either "white collar" bribes, or old fashioned street armed robbery, kidnapping etc. Weapons are banned so i leave to your imagination how criminals obtain them.

Leave it to socialists to destroy an economy, they are very good at it!

If in doubt, read Mises: Socialism An Economic and Sociological Analysis (free book download).

It's sad when I see the Venezuelan country experiencing such a collapse, the financial conditions affected by inflation like that will make the country devastated, hopefully there are countries that want to help so that the condition of the people in Venezuela is better and not as alarming as it is today.

Venezuela made a big mistake by taking oil rigs with military force. President should knew the impact of this step and should nationalising with more smooth and not cause loosing international company investment.
Its hard for venezuela peoples but i think this condition should not last long but its about politics too so i think its complicated for venezuela peoples