VENEZUELA
Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
The dream of becoming a millionaire is about to become really easy in Venezuela, where the International Monetary Fund predicts inflation will top 1 million percent by the end of the year.
Faced with an insurmountable budget deficit, President Nicolas Maduro continues to print money. Meanwhile, the situation is spiraling into conditions like those faced by Germany in 1923 or Zimbabwe in the late 2000s, Alejandro Werner, head of the IMF’s Western Hemisphere department, said as cited by Bloomberg.
Werner predicts Venezuela’s economy will shrink 18 percent in 2018 – the third consecutive year of double-digit contractions – due to continued falls in oil production.
Food and medicine shortages and the prevailing atmosphere of hopelessness has prompted hundreds of thousands of residents to flee to neighboring countries, and Werner warned of “intensifying spillover effects” as the situation grows worse.
What does that kind of inflation look like on the ground? The price of a cup of coffee in Caracas has soared 60,000 percent over the past year, Bloomberg said.
No comments:
Post a Comment