Latin America
Related: About this forumAs woes mount, economic stats vanish in Venezuela
http://www.businessinsider.com/afp-as-woes-mount-economic-stats-vanish-in-venezuela-2014-9Prices keep rising in Venezuela, economic activity is sputtering and shops struggle to fill their shelves.
But don't ask the central bank how bad things really are: it hasn't published key data in months.
The last time the central bank and the national statistics institute published the annual inflation figure was in May, when the indicator rose to 61 percent, the highest in Latin America.
Officials have not given any explanations despite repeated requests from economists, politicians and journalists seeking economic data.
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"The government has not wanted to make June and July inflation figures public"
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The Venezuelan central bank has withheld figures for months this time -- even though it is part of the International Monetary Fund's General Data Dissemination System, which encourages members to publish sound statistical data.
"Little by little, statistics have been put aside for political purposes," said Francisco Ibarra, director of the consulting firm Econometrica.
But, he added, "you can't hide inflation because people see it on the street."
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"Sooner or later, the International Monetary Fund will box Venezuela's ears because it's one thing to want to be a renegade, and another to hide information," he said.
Another key indicator that disappeared four months ago is the index of shortages of basic goods even as Venezuelans continue to stand in long lines at stores bereft of everything from toilet paper to cooking oil and medicine.
The central bank last reported the scarcity index in March, when 19 basic goods were said to face "serious supply problems."
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The government has yet to give a GDP forecast for 2014, with the last projection coming eight months ago, when it predicted growth of four percent.
This is the kind of crap you get when a bunch of uneducated and/or simply corrupt nincompoops run an oil-rich country.
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MADem
(135,425 posts)He's already mortgaged VZ's future to China, and he's too busy placating the boligarchs who are robbing him blind that he doesn't have a handle on the day-to-day at all.
It's astounding that a country with the national resources of VZ could be lumbering towards "failed state" status....
Marksman_91
(2,035 posts)But he can't do crap about it. He can't, for example, order an investigation into Diosdado Cabello, because that would be fully admitting that the suspicions everybody had about the big-heads of Chavismo being corrupt are not unfounded. And if such a thing were to happen, then Chavismo itself would crumble down completely due to its most important leaders being confirmed to be the very thing they've always preached against, which are corrupt oligarchs.
MADem
(135,425 posts)And it won't be the opposition who runs him out of town, it'll be his own PDVSA crew and other party loyalists, when they don't get their frozen chickens, toilet paper, and worst of all, paychecks.
Bacchus4.0
(6,837 posts)I am hearing today there may be some big changes in the goverment including getting rid of the VP. Will wait to see what Nicky says.
Judi Lynn
(160,516 posts)Why Chávez Happened: Carlos Andrés Pérez's Legacy
By Tim Padgett Wednesday, Dec. 29, 2010
It's fitting that Venezuela's disgraced former President Carlos Andrés Pérez died on Dec. 25. Like Marley's ghost in the Dickens Christmas classic, Pérez — or CAP, as he was known, who was 88 and will be buried, according to his family, in Venezuela — was a cautionary specter. His own ponderous chain should haunt Latin America's elite, which has never understood that its kleptocratic abuses, embodied by leaders like Pérez, almost always give rise, via ballots or bullets, to radical populists like Venezuela's current President, Hugo Chávez (who tried bullets first, then ballots). But given the events of this December, the Ghost of CAP should be spooking Chávez.
The last time I interviewed Pérez was in 1993, just days before he was impeached and later convicted on embezzlement charges. Chávez, then an army paratrooper officer, was sitting in prison for having led a bloody coup attempt against Pérez the year before — a retro-rebellion that was nonetheless greeted with loud cheers by most Venezuelans, who were fed up with watching venal cogollos (chieftains) like CAP plunder the fruits of the western hemisphere's largest oil reserves, leaving the country with an inexcusable poverty rate of more than 50%. One of the best-selling books in Caracas at the time was the three-volume Dictionary of Corruption in Venezuela, and the joke on the streets was that Chávez deserved 30 years behind bars: one for attempting the coup and 29 for failing.
Pérez could be a remarkable statesman. In his first presidency (1974-79), he did help make Venezuela an international player, as a founder of OPEC and a diplomatic broker in the Americas. "I effected transformations of this country that only my leadership could have achieved," he insisted during that last interview. But by then, CAP — whose second, extravagant inauguration in 1989 would have put a Hapsburg coronation to shame and whose security forces that same year killed hundreds of people rioting against his austerity measures — was also a poster boy for the epic gap between rich and poor in Latin America, the worst such gap of any region in the world. And even after Venezuela's elite tried to mollify the seething masses by ousting Pérez in 1993 and freeing Chávez in 1994, those oligarchs salsaed on as if they'd learned nothing. They sacked the nation's banking system to the point of collapse in 1995 — then looked shocked when Chávez was elected President in 1998.
Even today, when you talk to the well-heeled in Caracas or in Miami — where Pérez had been living in exile, and where the Doral district has absorbed so many affluent Venezuelans fleeing lefty Hugo that it's been dubbed Doralzuela — you realize that too many of them still don't get it. Which is why it's a toss-up as to whether Chávez's opposition can come up with a platform — and more important, a unifying candidate, who so far is nowhere to be seen — to keep El Comandante from winning a third six-year term in 2012.
More:
http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2039852,00.html
(It shouldn't need to be mentioned that Time has never supported any public figures other than neo-liberals.)
Marksman_91
(2,035 posts)Stop trying to bullshit your way to defend the most inept and corrupt government Venezuela has ever had. It's really not doing you any favors, and only makes you look more and more foolish.
