Venezuela Still Fucked
Venezuela—with a broken economy, runaway inflation, and rampant crime—is so fucked right now. How fucked is Venezuela since the last time we told you how fucked it was?
Venezuela has the distinction of being the world’s worst-performing economy, thanks to cratering oil prices, incompetence, and corruption. Despite that, the country continues to somehow make its foreign debt payments, funneling precious billions to outside lenders, even as one financial observer muses that “my sense is that they really run out of everything at the beginning of next year.” Despite that, Venezuela’s most immediate response to rampant inflation is to start printing bank notes in larger denominations. The country is so politically polarized that its courts are facing off against its legislators in a war over judicial appointments. The government grew so fat and happy on oil revenues that it allowed the entire agricultural sector to wither away, and now it can’t grow enough food to feed people. Even the supply of Venezuelan baseball players is drying up. People have no toilet paper. Farmers have no potato seeds. Even if they did, they couldn’t plant them, because armed robbers are stealing all the tractors and holding them for ransom. Venezuela’s most reliable current export is the Zika virus, although they’d rather not discuss it. In Caracas, the former mayor’s on trial for conspiracy, millions of people don’t have a reliable drinking water supply, electricity is being rationed, and people have taken to hijacking food trucks just to stay alive.
On the upside, it turns out Caracas may be only the second most homicidal city in the world.
Green shoots...
