Sunday 26 April 2015

NEWS: The Mess in Venezuela and the 200% of inflation





Alejandro Toledo, former president of Perú and author of "The Shared Society", writes in the op-ed pages of the New York Times, an article that is both accurate and simple, and that it is also ambitiously untitled: How to Fix the Mess in Venezuela. A must-read. "The recent news from Venezuela has been troubling — and also far from surprising. As the Venezuelan economy continues to struggle and inflation pushes many of the most basic everyday needs out of reach of ordinary working people, President Nicolás Maduro has responded, not with a plan, but with a crackdown. It has included arresting Antonio Ledezma, the mayor of Caracas, and other opposition figures on questionable charges — to say nothing of the jailings of peaceful protesters.
Mr. Maduro’s attempts to deflect criticism by pointing to aggression from the United States and international meddling — even if they were rooted in fact — would do nothing to solve Venezuela’s problems. If he were a serious leader, he would look first at the Venezuelan economy, which, in reality, is at least two economies, separate and far from equal. . . Fixing the economy, however, is only one of the tasks facing Mr. Maduro. The second is going to be tougher: He must shed the conspiratorial mind-set and authoritarian instincts he has carried over from the regime of his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, and accept that true democracy includes dissent, and that means he won’t always get his way." Read full article in The New York Times. E.T.P. 5'

 Tim Worstall writes in Forbes: "This isn’t perhaps the sort of thing that we normally congratulate people on, managing to so entirely screw up a national economy so as to generate 200% annual inflation. But we really should give credit where such credit is due. It is an achievement to manage to follow economic policies that blockheaded so, in the spirit of being entirely fair, congratulations to Venezuela’s Bolivarian socialism. It’s worth noting further that the reason for this stunning success of theirs is not because they’re a bit left wing, nor because they’ve tried to make the lives of the poor a bit better. It’s because they’ve ignored the most important rule of trying to run an economy, they’ve failed to understand that markets really do work. Something that we all need to recall in our own countries as various people tell us that we’ve got to excise market forces from one or another part of our own economies. There’s ways to deal with the effects that we don’t want from market forces: but ignoring or trying to abolish them leads to, well, to success like that that Venezuelan Bolivarian socialism is currently experiencing." Read full article in Forbes. E.T.P. 6' 

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