Food producers and economists say the measures announced late Thursday night, which include removing three zeroes from the denomination of Venezuela\u2019s currency, are likely to backfire and generate even more acute shortages and higher prices for consumers. Inflation climbed to an annual rate of 18.4 percent a year in January, the highest in Latin America and far above the official target of 10 to 12 percent.<\/p>\n
Mr. Ch\u00e1vez, whose leftist populism remains highly popular among Venezuela\u2019s poor and working classes, seemed unfazed by criticism of his policies. Appearing live on national television, he called for the creation of \u201ccommittees of social control,\u201d essentially groups of his political supporters whose purpose would be to report on farmers, ranchers, supermarket owners and street vendors who circumvent the state\u2019s effort to control food prices.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
You have to wonder; will the "committees of social control" be wearing brown shirts, or have armbands?<\/p>\n
\n\u201cIt is surreal that we\u2019ve arrived at a point where we are in danger of squandering a major oil boom,\u201d said Jos\u00e9 Guerra, a former chief of economic research at Venezuela\u2019s central bank, who left Mr. Chavez\u2019s government in 2004. \u201cIf the government insists on sticking to policies that are clearly failing, we may be headed down the road of Zimbabwe.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Amazing. Here Chavez takes the advice of the NYT and look what happens (The link to the NY Times will only bring you to the story for free, for one week. After that you’ll have to join TimesSelect [$50\/yr. – some people actually pay it] to read it. The Times believes in a market economy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4232"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9491,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4232\/revisions\/9491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}