Lee and the BIV: Two deaths
The world is mourning the death of Lee Kuan Yew, the visionary yet controversial father of modern Singapore. We at home should also get ready to mourn the imminent passing...
Economy
Anzoátegui's Black Dunes
I once called it “Anzoátegui’s unnatural wonder”: A large accumulation of petroleum coke, which is located outside PDVSA’s José Antonio Anzoátegui Petrochemical Complex (better known to the locals as...
The whys and wherefores of the $20,000 iPhone
(A guest post from reader/journalist Arnaldo Espinoza) The Whys and Wherefores of the $20,000 iPhone Arnaldo R. Espinoza (@Naldoxx) Prices in Venezuela stopped making sense a while ago,...
Oil and bullets
Two interesting stories, from the indispensable foreign press. First, Bloomberg’s Anatoly Kurmanaev explores the lack of progress in reining in guns and munition, and how it shows the...
Quico and Dorothy embarrass the government
Yesterday, to commemorate “Chávez Day,” the government spent countless dollars on ads in several of the world’s newspapers. The version that came out in Canada’s The Globe and Mail...
Worth Less
A year ago, the 100 bolivar banknote you see here on your left – Venezuela’s highest denominated, mind you – would buy you 92.6 U.S. cents on the parallel...
Who can stop the plunge? (Updated)
Here is the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2015: Caracas is one of the cheapest cities in the world. Here is the same source just two years ago, in...
"Nothing here except what people don't want"
I loved Efecto Cocuyo’s via crucis through several government-owned Farmapatria drug stores. “In the Ipasme location, we read the list to the sales person and he did not...
What is a dollar worth? Depends on who you know
Venezuela today has four different prices for the dollar – three of them official, one of them not. For basic imports (chavista code for “available only to Godgiven and...
An announcement about nothing
The Expectation-Disappointment cycle around Venezuela exchange-mechanism announcements is so well established by now, we barely get our hopes up any more. Today was no different. There was little...
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