Cash-Strapped Venezuela Offers to Pay for Medicines With Diamonds (emphasis added),
CARACAS, Venezuela—With hospital shelves bare and the government stumped on how to settle $5 billion in arrears to pharmaceutical companies, cash-strapped Venezuela recently offered some foreign suppliers alternative compensation: diamonds, gold and coltan, the rare metal used to make cellphones and Playstations.
The proposed exchange perplexed the pharma representatives, whose companies had no policies on accepting precious gems and metals as payment, according to three people familiar with the meeting last month where Venezuela’s health minister made the offer.
While it isn’t clear if any of the companies accepted it, the proposal underscores how Venezuela’s economic collapse is forcing President Nicolás Maduro’s embattled administration to improvise to pay for goods as severe dollar shortages push the country toward a barter society.
Just last week Maduro was trying to float the petro criptocurrency with gold and diamonds.
Meanwhile,
Venezuelan economists estimate Venezuela’s inflation could reach 30,000%. However, no accurate forecasts can be made during hyperinflations. Those that do so display their incompetence & foolishness .https://t.co/fLQgu3mmSr
— Prof. Steve Hanke (@steve_hanke) January 5, 2018
“Although those calculations (30,000%) may seem outrageous, Venezuela would still fall far short of the hyperinflation marks set by Hungary in 1945, Yugoslavia in 1992 and Zimbabwe in 2007. Those countries saw inflation rates double from one day to the next.”
Just as I scratched my head trying to figure out how Mugabe stayed in power I’m doing the same with Maduro. Is it possible that Venezuelans deserve their fate? Some collective psychic wound?
Some collective psychic wound?
Maybe they just don’t learn from experience.
They believed the stupid lies told to them, gave in to their inbred “gringo paranoia,” and fell for the class warfare tactic so essential to communism. They went from the frying pan into the fire with a big smile on their face. You don’t get rid of communists easily once they get their tentacles into everything. They are blindly dedicated to their ideology (like ISIS) and they will not hesitate to kill
to remain in power. It’s not “overthrow the rich and then you’ll have everything they stole,” it’s more like “overthrow the rich and we will all be poor together.” To paraphase Lenin, if you have to kill 9/10s of the population to preserve socialism, then do it without hesitation.