Peking (lame) duck
A few weeks ago I wrote an article for Foreign Policy’s Transitions blog about Nicolás Maduro’s China trip. Given the influence China is playing in how Venezuela shapes...
Economy
Omnishambles Chronicles
Nicolás Maduro had barely finished making his big Foreign Exchange Control system announcement yesterday before he was in damage control mode. Having initially announced that a sum roughly equivalent...
Communicational hegemony = fun with numbers
Pro-government website Noticias 24 had an interesting headline this morning: In other words, Venezuela was one of the countries in Latin America that received the highest numbers of...
Merentes' sin? Brutal honesty
It’s hard to dislike poor Finance Minister Nelson Merentes. In a sea of chavista insanity, he usually comes across as a sort-of reasonable guy or, at the very...
Giving people free money can be expensive!
Reading Quico’s arbitrage how-to-manual, the casual reader could be forgiven for thinking that these are the exceptions in Venezuela. It’s not like that. The revolution is all about...
The butterfly effect
On October 22, 1991, something momentuous took place in Venezuela. You probably don’t remember hearing about it in the news. Heck, maybe it didn’t even make the news...
A Samán-onic decision
While the government is busy putting pressure on supermarkets and the media to “control” food shortages, what about those organized street vendors who sell scarce in the streets...
The roadmap, part III: Creating an ecosystem for growth
(A series of posts on how Venezuela can begin to grow again. For some background, see here and here) The second regularity the authors find in The Growth...
To control shortages, ignorance is bliss (Updated)
The government is pulling out all the stops to contain the wave of shortages, from importing our way out of this mess to militarizing supermarket check-outs. But Nicolás...
The Lexical Innovations of the Revolution
Let us all thank Jorge Giordani that this phrase is now in a Bloomberg headline. From the piece itself… One dollar buys 41.2 bolivars on the black market,...
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