Caracas Chronicles

Ricardo Hausmann and Roberto Rigobon must be the two most respected and accomplished Venezuelan academics out there. You don’t get teaching posts at Harvard and MIT for tirar piedras. Yesterday, I got my hands on their study of the fraud hypothesis and, as you’d expect, it makes the most comprehensive and serious case yet for the fraud hypothesis.

I’m not through with the report, and I don’t want to comment at length until I’ve read it all, but one thing I can tell you for sure: there’s no dismissing it as “UFO stuff.” There are serious charges in here, and they demand serious answers from CNE and CC/OAS. In particular, their assertion that there is statistical evidence that the sample taken by CNE for the cold-audit was not random raises very troubling questions for the authorities.

I recommend reading it carefully.

You can download the paper (pdf format, 1.1 mb) by Hausmann and Rigobon here.

Join a moderated debate on this post.