A couple of my liberal in laws think I am nuts for having 6 months of toilet paper in the attic. Along with a case of good quality bath soap. A 2 year supply of toothbrushes, dental floss and toothpaste.
These same in laws shop on Sunday each week and buy........exactly one week’s supply of food. But that’s all they need because the clubhouse in their retirement community has a restaurant /chuckle
Which is too bad because Venezuela could have been one of the richest countries in South America from both tropical agricultural exports and crude oil exports.
Phase IV: Orthodox stabilization takes over under a new government. An IMF program will be enacted; and, when everything is said and done, the real wage will have declined massively, to a level significantly lower than when the whole episode began! Moreover, that decline will be very persistent, because the politics and economics of the experience will have depressed investment and promoted capital flight. The extremity of real wage declines is due to a simple fact: capital is mobile across borders, but labor is not.
Unskilled labor can be, of course - the immigration policy of the current 0bama administration is attempting to challenge that assertion, albeit with very little apparent success. What it does promise to accomplish is to export poverty, to spread the load from a source sucked dry to one that still has surplus sufficient to parasitize. The model above indicates that one sign of this phase is decreasing inventory both in manufactured goods and in finance. Unfortunately, by the time that canary is dead, the coal miners tend to be stuck.
And so, a new government for Venezuela and an IMF bailout (which is, after all, merely another redistributive scheme), with decades of recovery ahead that turn out to be worse than the original state of "economic injustice". Socialists in the United States continue to insist that they can do it right in a triumph of theory over experience. We really don't want the experience.
F*** Venezuela.
Fracking has done more good for the world than the PC pussies at the state department. All the bad actors in the world who use their oil revenue to cause havoc are seeing their ambitions reversed or scaled back- Venezuela, Russia, the terrorist-backing emirs in Qatar, ISIS, etc. etc. Now let’s get Keystone rolling for the coup de grace!
The revolution will start in the State of Zulia where most of the oil is. It will be very ugly.
I lived in Venezuela for a few years before Chavez. It was a lovely country and prosperous. It was also corrupt which lead to the election of Chavez. Chavez won the first election fair and square. His second election and that of Maduro where the result of rampant voter fraud.
You will know the revolution is in progress when they start killing the Cuban Secret Service Agents in Venezuela. They were trained by the old Soviet KGB and are ruthless killers.
Maybe we will get to see on National TV Maduro hunkered down like Salvador Allende back in 1973! Helmet and sub machine gun in his last few minutes of power.
OK, fixed.