Their currency is worthless.
also fyi... current Venezuela Marxist Dictator Nicolas Maduro was a former union bus driver who was loyal to former Marxist Dictator Hugo Chavez. He doesn't know squat about how to run a business, how macro or micro economics work, nor how to run a country. This is what Hollywood loves... Marxism. (emphasis mine)
Venezuela knocks three zeros off ailing currency amid hyperinflation. 😦 #MarxismSuckshttps://t.co/807basjrKJ via @Reuters— Global Awareness 101 (@Mononoke__Hime) April 11, 2018
Reuters News
written by Corina Pons, Deisy Buitrago
Thursday March 22, 2018
CARACAS - Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro ordered a re-denomination of the ailing bolivar currency on Thursday, by knocking three zeroes off amid hyperinflation and a crippling economic crisis.
The measure to divide the so-called bolivar fuerte - or “strong bolivar” - currency by 1,000 would take effect from June 4, the socialist leader said. It would not have any impact on the bolivar’s value.
The move illustrates the collapse of the bolivar, which has fallen 99.99 percent against the U.S. dollar on the black market since Maduro came to power in April 2013. A $100 purchase of bolivars then would now be worth just a single U.S. cent.
But Maduro, 55, presented the move as a positive development intended to protect Venezuela against currency speculators and a U.S.-led “economic war” against the OPEC member.
Critics said the currency measure was no panacea for Venezuela’s economic mess and just a psychological ploy to make Venezuelans forget the extent of the hyperinflation.
While the move sounds like a currency revaluation, economists consider it a currency re-denomination as the country is not changing the value of its official exchange rate.
Venezuelans will not need to turn in the currency now in their wallets but all new currency printed or minted will be in the new denominations.
Millions of Venezuelans are suffering from shortages of food and medicines during a fifth year of recession that critics blame on government incompetence and corruption, but Maduro says is due to Western hostility against him plus the fall of oil prices.
“Venezuela has been victim of a brutal, economic war,” said Maduro, whose government has been targeted by the United States, European Union and Canada for sanctions over allegations of abusing democracy and rights.
Maduro made the announcement during an event shown live on TV, flanked by aides and bankers, to discuss Venezuela’s new petro cryptocurrency.
Venezuela’s government similarly re-denominated its currency by knocking off three zeroes a decade ago.
Prices in Venezuela rose 6,147 percent in the 12 months through February, according to estimates by the country’s opposition-led National Assembly, broadly in line with independent economists’ figures.
Maduro is running for re-election on May 20 in a vote critics say is rigged to extend the socialists’ rule.
The opposition coalition is boycotting the vote, though one leader Henri Falcon has broken ranks to run against Maduro. He is promising to dollarize Venezuela’s economy as a way to beat hyperinflation and regain investor confidence.
“Amid the biggest economic collapse in the history of Latin America, the government of Nicolas Maduro attempts to hide hyperinflation by knocking zeros off the currency,” said Francisco Rodriguez, a Venezuelan economist and Wall Street analyst working as Falcon’s chief economic adviser.
Caracas Chronicles
It’s Official: Venezuela Enters Hyperinflation
written by Frank Muci
December 7, 2017
According to Venezuela’s National Assembly, consumer price inflation rose to 57% in November from 45% in October – having blown past the classic 50% threshold, the country is officially in hyperinflation.
In hyperinflation, prices rise at a high and accelerating rate, fueled by unbridled central bank money printing and the population’s unwillingness to hold the currency. Latin America hadn’t seen hyperinflation in 25 years and skeptics balked at the thought that it was even possible for an oil exporter, but alas, Venezuela defied expectations once again.
The government essentially doubled the monetary base in November, a jaw-dropping record increase. All the new money was used to finance public sector year-end bonuses, Sunday’s municipal “elections” and the ordinary fiscal deficit. As a result, 12-month inflation rose over 1,700%, another all-time-high. To put things in perspective, daily inflation surpassed annual inflation in much of Europe.
Runaway inflation and the economic crisis are already fraying the fabric of Venezuelan society. Households, rich and poor, are cutting back on food because it’s too expensive, especially proteins, resulting in involuntary weight loss for three quarters for the population. Roughly half of university students have dropped out to look for a job because their parents can no longer sustain them. Malaria and other eradicated diseases are back with a vengeance. Shockingly, Venezuelans crossing into Colombia by land now outnumber North African immigrants to Europe.
But bleak as it is, life in Venezuela will only get worse. Like the national oil company’s production collapse and the external debt default and restructuring saga, hyperinflation is just taking off. Without a complete overhaul, misery in Venezuela will deepen as Zimbabwe-style price increases become the norm and inflation accelerates to ten or twenty thousand percent per annum. Hunger will grow as prices outpace salaries and Venezuela’s $5 monthly minimum wage falls closer and closer to zero. 2018 will be the fifth consecutive year of economic recession.
Hyperinflation will cripple Venezuela’s dysfunctional economy. As production nosedives and tax revenue falls, for instance, the fiscal deficit will rise, increasing the speed at which the central bank prints money to cover it. This is gasoline to hyperinflation, which will make the economy and tax revenue fall even more in a toxic feedback loop. The government may hike the minimum wage to any level they like in response to rising prices, but it wont work. Real wages can’t rise if fewer goods and services are being produced.
The three things the bolívar is meant to do – store value, measure value, and be a useful exchange token – it’s failing at, making it more likely that citizens abandon the currency. Absurdly, ATMs only allow Bs. 10 thousand in withdrawals (10 U.S. cents) when groceries can be thirty times that, and even when shops take debit/credit cards, transactions can take minutes to go through the faulty interbank network, causing long lines. The bolivar’s purchasing power melts away in weeks thanks to galloping inflation, making nominal statistics like the government’s 36 trillion bolivar 2018 budget meaningless. As the currency’s problems worsen, the economy may eventually dollarize de facto or simply break down into barter.
On this historic day, it’s important to remember that hyperinflation and Venezuela’s economic collapse were entirely self-inflicted. For more than a decade, Presidents Chávez and Maduro wiped out the domestic private sector with excessive controls and expropriations. They didn’t save a penny and racked up $150bn plus in external debt. What for? To finance consumption, not investment, even as oil prices were at an unprecedented $100 per barrel. They couldn’t stand congressional oversight or accountability so spending took off outside the budget. Behind the scenes, Chávez gutted the central bank’s independence, most seriously in a 2009 reform that allowed direct lending to state-owned enterprises.
Then, when oil prices suddenly crashed in 2014 and Venezuela’s export revenues dried up, the regime slashed imports by 80% over the four years to keep paying the debt and inadvertently threw the economy into a tailspin. GDP fell some 35% and the budget deficit bulged as if the country was at war, making the government completely reliant on the central bank printing press for deficit financing. Now domestic industry is in tatters and the country can’t make up for it with imports, so people are just dying for lack of food and medicine. Meanwhile, hyperinflation is taking off as the government floods the country in new bolívares to pay its bills.
With a likely Maduro “reelection” in 2018 and no talk of economic reforms, Venezuela’s outlook is dire. It’s deluded to think that the criminals that made Venezuela unlivable despite a trillion dollar oil bonanza might somehow stop hyperinflation, stabilize free-falling oil production or otherwise improve living standards. It’s deluded to think that they even want to. As long as Maduro is in charge, Venezuela will continue to walk the path of North Korea and Yemen until it’s global pariah and destitute wasteland.
Caracas Chronicles is 100% reader-supported. Support independent Venezuelan journalism by making a donation.
Here is Hollywood Actor Sean Penn with Venezuela Marxist Dictator Nicolas Maduro.
Here is Hollywood Director Oliver Stone and Hollywood Actor Sean Penn with former Marxist Dictator Hugo Chavez. They were best buds.
Here is Hollywood Director Oliver Stone with new Marxist Dictator Nicolas Maduro.
Here is Hollywood Actor Danny Glover with Venezuela Marxist Dictator Nicolas Maduro.
Here is Hollywood Actor Jamie Foxx with Venezuela Marxist Dictator Nicolas Maduro.
Here is Hollywood Producer, Director, Actor Activist defending the Venezuela Marxist Government.
I went down a rabbit hole wanting to show you people in Hollywood who support the Marxist Dictatorship in Venezuela. There were too many to share with you. The reason why I wanted to show you who in Hollywood supports and agrees with the Venezuela Marxist Regime is so that I can point out how crazy it is for any person in America to allow Hollywood to influence our American politics. (emphasis mine)
Islamic State of Iran Crime Research Center
The Secret Backstory Of How Obama Let Hezbollah Off The Hook
written by Josh Meyer
In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation. The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities. Over the next eight years, agents working out of a top-secret DEA facility in Chantilly, Virginia, used wiretaps, undercover operations and informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies. They followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.
But as Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way, according to interviews with dozens of participants who in many cases spoke for the first time about events shrouded in secrecy, and a review of government documents and court records. When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed, hindered or rejected their requests. The Justice Department declined requests by Project Cassandra and other authorities to file criminal charges against major players such as Hezbollah’s high-profile envoy to Iran, a Lebanese bank that allegedly laundered billions in alleged drug profits, and a central player in a U.S.-based cell of the Iranian paramilitary Quds force. And the State Department rejected requests to lure high-value targets to countries where they could be arrested.
John Brennan Obama’s White House counterterrorism adviser, who became CIA director in 2013.
The man who would become Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser and then CIA director, John Brennan John Brennan Obama’s White House counterterrorism adviser, who became CIA director in 2013., went further. He recommended in a policy paper that “the next president has the opportunity to set a new course for relations between the two countries” through not only a direct dialogue, but “greater assimilation of Hezbollah into Lebanon’s political system.”
John “Jack” Kelly DEA agent overseeing Hezbollah cases at Special Operations Division, who named task force Project Cassandra after clashes with other U.S. agencies about Hezbollah drug-terror links. Within months, task force officials said, Project Cassandra was all but dead. Some of its most senior officials, including Jack Kelly John “Jack” Kelly DEA agent overseeing Hezbollah cases at Special Operations Division, who named task force Project Cassandra after clashes with other U.S. agencies about Hezbollah drug-terror links., the veteran DEA supervisory agent who created and led the task force, were transferred to other assignments. And Asher himself left the task force long before that, after the Defense Department said his contract would not be renewed. As a result, the U.S. government lost insight into not only drug trafficking and other criminal activity worldwide, but also into Hezbollah’s illicit conspiracies with top officials in the Iranian, Syrian, Venezuelan and Russian governments — all the way up to presidents Nicolas Maduro, Assad and Putin, according to former task force members and other current and former U.S. officials.
Original art by @modográfico
Caracas Chronicles
It’s Official: Venezuela Enters Hyperinflation
written by Frank Muci
December 7, 2017
According to Venezuela’s National Assembly, consumer price inflation rose to 57% in November from 45% in October – having blown past the classic 50% threshold, the country is officially in hyperinflation.
In hyperinflation, prices rise at a high and accelerating rate, fueled by unbridled central bank money printing and the population’s unwillingness to hold the currency. Latin America hadn’t seen hyperinflation in 25 years and skeptics balked at the thought that it was even possible for an oil exporter, but alas, Venezuela defied expectations once again.
The government essentially doubled the monetary base in November, a jaw-dropping record increase. All the new money was used to finance public sector year-end bonuses, Sunday’s municipal “elections” and the ordinary fiscal deficit. As a result, 12-month inflation rose over 1,700%, another all-time-high. To put things in perspective, daily inflation surpassed annual inflation in much of Europe.
Runaway inflation and the economic crisis are already fraying the fabric of Venezuelan society. Households, rich and poor, are cutting back on food because it’s too expensive, especially proteins, resulting in involuntary weight loss for three quarters for the population. Roughly half of university students have dropped out to look for a job because their parents can no longer sustain them. Malaria and other eradicated diseases are back with a vengeance. Shockingly, Venezuelans crossing into Colombia by land now outnumber North African immigrants to Europe.
But bleak as it is, life in Venezuela will only get worse. Like the national oil company’s production collapse and the external debt default and restructuring saga, hyperinflation is just taking off. Without a complete overhaul, misery in Venezuela will deepen as Zimbabwe-style price increases become the norm and inflation accelerates to ten or twenty thousand percent per annum. Hunger will grow as prices outpace salaries and Venezuela’s $5 monthly minimum wage falls closer and closer to zero. 2018 will be the fifth consecutive year of economic recession.
Hyperinflation will cripple Venezuela’s dysfunctional economy. As production nosedives and tax revenue falls, for instance, the fiscal deficit will rise, increasing the speed at which the central bank prints money to cover it. This is gasoline to hyperinflation, which will make the economy and tax revenue fall even more in a toxic feedback loop. The government may hike the minimum wage to any level they like in response to rising prices, but it wont work. Real wages can’t rise if fewer goods and services are being produced.
The three things the bolívar is meant to do – store value, measure value, and be a useful exchange token – it’s failing at, making it more likely that citizens abandon the currency. Absurdly, ATMs only allow Bs. 10 thousand in withdrawals (10 U.S. cents) when groceries can be thirty times that, and even when shops take debit/credit cards, transactions can take minutes to go through the faulty interbank network, causing long lines. The bolivar’s purchasing power melts away in weeks thanks to galloping inflation, making nominal statistics like the government’s 36 trillion bolivar 2018 budget meaningless. As the currency’s problems worsen, the economy may eventually dollarize de facto or simply break down into barter.
On this historic day, it’s important to remember that hyperinflation and Venezuela’s economic collapse were entirely self-inflicted. For more than a decade, Presidents Chávez and Maduro wiped out the domestic private sector with excessive controls and expropriations. They didn’t save a penny and racked up $150bn plus in external debt. What for? To finance consumption, not investment, even as oil prices were at an unprecedented $100 per barrel. They couldn’t stand congressional oversight or accountability so spending took off outside the budget. Behind the scenes, Chávez gutted the central bank’s independence, most seriously in a 2009 reform that allowed direct lending to state-owned enterprises.
Then, when oil prices suddenly crashed in 2014 and Venezuela’s export revenues dried up, the regime slashed imports by 80% over the four years to keep paying the debt and inadvertently threw the economy into a tailspin. GDP fell some 35% and the budget deficit bulged as if the country was at war, making the government completely reliant on the central bank printing press for deficit financing. Now domestic industry is in tatters and the country can’t make up for it with imports, so people are just dying for lack of food and medicine. Meanwhile, hyperinflation is taking off as the government floods the country in new bolívares to pay its bills.
With a likely Maduro “reelection” in 2018 and no talk of economic reforms, Venezuela’s outlook is dire. It’s deluded to think that the criminals that made Venezuela unlivable despite a trillion dollar oil bonanza might somehow stop hyperinflation, stabilize free-falling oil production or otherwise improve living standards. It’s deluded to think that they even want to. As long as Maduro is in charge, Venezuela will continue to walk the path of North Korea and Yemen until it’s global pariah and destitute wasteland.
Caracas Chronicles is 100% reader-supported. Support independent Venezuelan journalism by making a donation.
I went down a rabbit hole wanting to show you people in Hollywood who support the Marxist Dictatorship in Venezuela. There were too many to share with you. The reason why I wanted to show you who in Hollywood supports and agrees with the Venezuela Marxist Regime is so that I can point out how crazy it is for any person in America to allow Hollywood to influence our American politics. (emphasis mine)
Obama (left) and John Brennan (right)
I'm sharing John Brennan tweet above to show you just how twisted they are. He wittingly makes himself out to be a moral authority, just like Jimmy Kimmel and the rest of the American hating Hollywood Marxist cabal.
(emphasis mine)
ALL OF THESE MEN ABOVE ARE VERY CLOSE ALLIES.
Venezuela (left), Russia (middle), Syria (right)
The Secret Backstory Of How Obama Let Hezbollah Off The Hook
written by Josh Meyer
In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation. The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities. Over the next eight years, agents working out of a top-secret DEA facility in Chantilly, Virginia, used wiretaps, undercover operations and informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies. They followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.
But as Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way, according to interviews with dozens of participants who in many cases spoke for the first time about events shrouded in secrecy, and a review of government documents and court records. When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed, hindered or rejected their requests. The Justice Department declined requests by Project Cassandra and other authorities to file criminal charges against major players such as Hezbollah’s high-profile envoy to Iran, a Lebanese bank that allegedly laundered billions in alleged drug profits, and a central player in a U.S.-based cell of the Iranian paramilitary Quds force. And the State Department rejected requests to lure high-value targets to countries where they could be arrested.
John Brennan Obama’s White House counterterrorism adviser, who became CIA director in 2013.
The man who would become Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser and then CIA director, John Brennan John Brennan Obama’s White House counterterrorism adviser, who became CIA director in 2013., went further. He recommended in a policy paper that “the next president has the opportunity to set a new course for relations between the two countries” through not only a direct dialogue, but “greater assimilation of Hezbollah into Lebanon’s political system.”
John “Jack” Kelly DEA agent overseeing Hezbollah cases at Special Operations Division, who named task force Project Cassandra after clashes with other U.S. agencies about Hezbollah drug-terror links. Within months, task force officials said, Project Cassandra was all but dead. Some of its most senior officials, including Jack Kelly John “Jack” Kelly DEA agent overseeing Hezbollah cases at Special Operations Division, who named task force Project Cassandra after clashes with other U.S. agencies about Hezbollah drug-terror links., the veteran DEA supervisory agent who created and led the task force, were transferred to other assignments. And Asher himself left the task force long before that, after the Defense Department said his contract would not be renewed. As a result, the U.S. government lost insight into not only drug trafficking and other criminal activity worldwide, but also into Hezbollah’s illicit conspiracies with top officials in the Iranian, Syrian, Venezuelan and Russian governments — all the way up to presidents Nicolas Maduro, Assad and Putin, according to former task force members and other current and former U.S. officials.
former President Obama who was in control of the U.S. government at that time, literally allowed them, Venezuela, Russia, Syria, Iran to commit whatever the heck crimes they wanted. Open the door for them to go undetected. THIS HERE IS THE COLLUSION.
(emphasis mine)
The derailment of Project Cassandra also has undermined U.S. efforts to determine how much cocaine from the various Hezbollah-affiliated networks is coming into the United States, especially from Venezuela, where dozens of top civilian and military officials have been under investigation for more than a decade. Recently, the Trump administration designated the country’s vice president, a close ally of Hezbollah and of Lebanese-Syrian descent, as a global narcotics kingpin. Meanwhile, Hezbollah — in league with Iran — continues to undermine U.S. interests in Iraq, Syria and throughout wide swaths of Latin America and Africa, including providing weapons and training to anti-American Shiite militias. And Safieddine, the Ghost and other associates continue to play central roles in the trafficking of drugs and weapons, current and former U.S. officials believe. “They were a paramilitary organization with strategic importance in the Middle East, and we watched them become an international criminal conglomerate generating billions of dollars for the world’s most dangerous activities, including chemical and nuclear weapons programs and armies that believe America is their sworn enemy,” said Kelly, the supervisory DEA agent and lead coordinator of its Hezbollah cases. “If they are violating U.S. statutes,” he asked, “why can’t we bring them to justice?”
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