Listen, things are going great in Venezuela, ok?
Sure, you’ll hear a lot of hyperinflationary horror stories and you’ll see all manner of pictures and videos that suggest the situation is completely out of control.
And yes, Nicolás Maduro did appoint a literal cocaine kingpin to oversee a bungled effort to “restructure” the country’s crippling debt load.
And sure, all kinds of international media outlets have suggested that the citizenry is increasingly turning to cryptocurrency mining in an effort to escape the nightmare of the rapidly depreciating bolivar.
And yes, there’s some desperate cattle rustling going on along the border that would seem to underscore the notion that the economy is imploding.
But all of that is “fake news” deliberately designed to undermine the entirely legitimate government. Fortunately, Maduro piggybacked off Trump’s “dishonest media awards” idea on the way to holding his own “ceremony” aimed at identifying the spreaders of lies. Here’s that video:
As you can see, Bloomberg is on Maduro’s list.
Given that, you definitely shouldn’t trust BBG’s “Cafe Con Leche Index” which tracks the price of a cup of coffee “served piping hot at a bakery in eastern Caracas.”
And it’s a good thing you can’t trust it, because if you could, you would be inclined to think that inflation is running at a truly “impressive” annualized rate of 448,025%. Here’s the chart (the price has gone from 5,500 bolivars to 45,000 bolivars in the past 12 weeks):
On the “bright” side, Bloomberg does note on Thursday that this is “still a far cry from the worst hyperinflation episodes in history, like those in Hungary in the 1940s or Zimbabwe last decade.”
So Maduro has that going for him.
Don’t worry Venezuela, the “petro” will save you.
Bad news for money counterfeiters.
that was funny–in less it happens in the good old usa.
forgot.
the .gov .fed wants to turn us in surfs. sure to wonder how this all shakes out–hmm.
i do think the fed can keep up the printing presses running tho.
after all they use our money to screw us–simple really.
sb
The choices are getting worse, worser, worstest. Keep printing sacrifice the dollar create massive inflation, normalize and balance the budget then start paying it all back (yea, right), let bond rates rise and take the markets off a cliff. What do you think the Fed will do? Oh yea the presses are still warm from yesterday.
The chart for coffee looks eerily like the chart for bitcoin. Bitcoin already normalized (somewhat), so can’t we expect a coffee to do the same? Practically a slam-dunk
LOL at the “slam-dunk” especially the dunk part….pun intended? wish I had a donut to go with it!