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In Venezuela, 'Cutting-Edge' Cryptocurrency is Nowhere To Be Found (reuters.com)
Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro has made ambitious claims that the nation's petro cryptocurrency is backed by 5 billion barrels of petroleum reserves. But when reporters of Reuters conducted a months-long investigation, they found that petro is getting little to no traction in the nation or elsewhere. Reuters: Located in an isolated savanna in the center of the country, Atapirire is the only town in an area the government says is brimming with 5 billion barrels of petroleum. Venezuela has pledged those reserves as backing for a digital currency dubbed the "petro," which Maduro launched in February. This month he vowed it would be the cornerstone of a recovery plan for the crisis-stricken nation. But Atapirire residents say they have seen no efforts by the government to tap those reserves. And they have little confidence that their struggling village has a front-row seat to a revolution in finance. "There is no sign of that petro here," said homemaker Igdalia Diaz. She launched into a diatribe about her town's crumbling school, pitted roads, frequent blackouts and perpetually hungry citizens.
It turns out that Venezuela's petro is hard to spot almost anywhere. Over a period of four months, Reuters spoke with a dozen experts on cryptocurrencies and oil-field valuation, traveled to the site of the pledged oil reserves and scoured the coin's digital transaction records in an effort to learn more. The hunt turned up little evidence of a thriving petro trade. The coin is not sold on any major cryptocurrency exchange. No shops are known to accept it.
It turns out that Venezuela's petro is hard to spot almost anywhere. Over a period of four months, Reuters spoke with a dozen experts on cryptocurrencies and oil-field valuation, traveled to the site of the pledged oil reserves and scoured the coin's digital transaction records in an effort to learn more. The hunt turned up little evidence of a thriving petro trade. The coin is not sold on any major cryptocurrency exchange. No shops are known to accept it.
Venezuela has run out of other people's money.
Sweden == capitalism
Sweden didn't nationalize companies/ other peoples equipment, try to force farmers to produce under the cost of production, heavily regulate internal prices outside of market value, centrally govern production/distribution.
Oil in the ground ultimately isn't really worth that much when you can't extract, process, and ship it. And Venezuela's aging oil infrastructure has been struggling for years now. Case in point this article from Routers that reports that Venezuela's tankers have been banned from some ports because they're so poorly maintained that they leak unacceptable amounts of oil into the local area. https://www.reuters.com/articl...
At the end of the day this really does show one of the weakness of socialist monoculture economies. If the one good you can sell starts too loose value you'll quickly find yourself in a pretty dire situation. Even more so if you're government is both corrupt and too incompetent to modernize your industrial equipment.
Norway basically nationalized its oil industry, but did so with some forethought and planning, creating a sovereign wealth fund with the intent of maximizing the benefit of oil revenues for Norwegians, rather than simply enriching oil companies and skimming royalties off the top. You can call that socialism if you like, but the fact is that Norway's sovereign wealth fund is now large enough to both pay for a fairly generous welfare state and sit there as a protection against what can be a fairly volatile international market.
What Venezuela did under the Chavistas is to use oil revenues to pay for its welfare state, but also to enrich the Chavistas and their generals, and try to buy influence with other Latin American countries (Venezuela basically underwrote the Cuban economy for years by selling oil to the country at what amounted to almost give-away prices). If Venezuela had duplicated the Norwegian model, it would actually have weathered the storm that came with the collapse of oil prices reasonably well. To be fair, it's not like previous right wing regimes were all that cautious, and certainly while Norway is a fairly advanced country firmly in the developed world, while Venezuela has much higher poverty rates, but still, looking at Venezuela is to see a socialist state that also basically functions as a kleptocracy, that managed to keep afloat when oil prices were very high, and the Chavistas gambled that that would always be the way.
To be even fairer, Venezuela was hardly the only petro-jurisdiction to squander the wealth. Up in my neck of the woods, Alberta had the Heritage Fund, with the idea that it would function like Norway's sovereign wealth fund, but has squandered much of it as well. North Dakota was similarly irresponsible.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Venezuela has no petroleum industry anymore. No oil company can pay (or even feed) workers. They cannot maintain equipment. They cannot ship oil.
Unitl Venezuela undergoes a complete reboot, they have nothing and people will just flee. If I had Jeff Bezos level money I'd take over a hundred square miles or so of fertile farmland and start running my own country, you'd get endless waves of people happy to join your new country that had food and water and security. Then just slowly grow outward until you own all of Venezuela, by the simple choice of the people moving there. Call it "True Venezuela", to preserve national identity which still has value even if the country itself does not currently.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Really? A communist state whose people can't even get TP doesn't really have petro-backed cryptocurrency??
Next you'll be telling me that my pen pal bride just wants a green card! (sniff :( )
Norway basically nationalized its oil industry ...
Norway did nothing of the sort.
In May 1963, the Norwegian Government proclaimed sovereignty over the Norwegian continental shelf. ...
... Norway also established the principle that the state was to have a 50 per cent ownership interest in every production licence. [in other words, if you want to drill Norway's oil and gas - which is already owned by the state - Norway gets half ownership in the license to do so - hardly nationalizing anything]
In spring 2001, the Storting decided that 21.5 % of the value of the SDFI portfolio could be sold; 15 % was sold to Equinor and 6.5 % to other licensees. The sale of part of the SDFI portfolio to Equinor was seen as an important element in the successful part-privatisation of the company. Equinor was listed on the stock exchange in June the same year, and now operates in the same way as any other commercial actor on the Norwegian continental shelf. The state-owned enterprise Petoro was established in May 2001 to manage the SDFI on behalf of the state. In 2007, Equinor merged with Norsk Hydro’s oil and gas division.
Heck, it seems like Norway even privatized at least parts of the state's ownership stake in the actual oil/gas in the ground.
There's nothing socialist about a sovereign nation deciding to manage its oil and gas assets that way. In fact, it's quite non-socialist in its lack of direct government control and apparent privatization of portions of that control.
*sigh* Inflation doesn't happen because people think it will happen. It happens because the government is printing too much money. If you double the amount of currency in the system, everyone figures it's worth half what it used to be, so prices double to compensate. Usually, governments resort to this if they're spending more than they're bringing in via tax revenue. Germany did this in the 1930s to try to pay back war debt. Venezuela does it to try to maintain their socialist paradise ("free" services for everyone). A government spending more than it brings in has two options - keep the debt on the books, or print money to pay for it. When a government prints more money, it's basically stealing from its citizens by devaluing the currency. The money a citizen has in his wallet is worth half of what it used to be, and the value of the other half gets transferred to the government in the form of extra currency it has printed. It's a way to tax people without actually needing them to actually hand over the money to a tax collection agency.
What saved Brazil was reforms that got government spending under control. Their new currency may have helped people put more faith in the currency, but it's not what stopped inflation. As Venezuela is finding out. Same thing nearly happened to Greece, except they were on the Euro. So their government over-spending ended up being paid for by other countries using the Euro. Which is why they banded together and gave Greece an ultimatum - adopt spending and economic reforms ("austerity"), or be kicked out of the Eurozone.
Everything that's consumed has to be produced, so productivity is the true fundamental currency of an economy. The money you choose to use is just a representation of that productivity. If you manipulate your monetary currency only to the extent necessary to keep its value more or less constant relative to productivity (what governments do with a fiat currency), then it remains stable, leaving the economy free to operate on its own. But when you start screwing around with your money supply to try to fix other problems (like pay for massive government debt), it shows up as a deviation between your money's value and the value of productivity - the value of your currency changes by a large amount. Basically, manipulating your currency is like changing the markings on a ruler. It may change the number of your measurements (number of Bolivars needed to buy a dozen eggs), but the fundamental distance (productivity needed to raise chickens to produce a dozen eggs) does not change. All you do is create additional overhead as citizens have to spend more time and effort trying to keep track of and compensate for changing currency values (i.e. waste productivity on financial bookkeeping, rather than on producing actual goods and services).
U.S. sanctions have nothing to do with it. A healthy economy is mostly domestic - most trade happens inside the country (U.S. imports + exports are only about 20% of its domestic GDP), so can't really be hurt by foreign sanctions. U.S. sanctions end up hurting Venezuela only because its government has completely crippled its domestic economy with its boneheaded economic policies.
This definition means that all of the democratic socialist spouters are wrong and that no European country is actually socialist in any form.
No, it means that larger portions of their economy utilize socialism, but that portions remain capitalist. Many countries (including the United States) can be considered such a mix.
And communism isn't socialism. Communism believes in effectively abolishing the state and going to pure shared ownership. No country has achieved communism.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
....Bernie Sanders has three homes and made $3.6 million dollars last year....Leftists and socialists violently riot....
Bernie Sanders never said people shouldn't own their own homes or be able to make money. He's for "medicare for all" because he believes that health care is a human right and that the role of government is to guarantee some basic human rights. If you're politically opposed to the idea of health care as a basic human right, make an intelligent intellectual argument as to why healthcare is not a right and why the government shouldn't provide medical insurance, but don't just attack the man and try to paint him as a hypocrite for owning three homes or having a job. He's not against individual property ownership or private enterprise.
It wasn't leftists who rioted in Charlottesville last year and ran over a counter protestor. It wasn't a leftist President who regularly and openly encourages violence at his political rallies, then promises to pay the legal bills if his supporters beat someone. It wasn't a leftist who committed the most deadly domestic terrorist attack in our nations history. You're trying to frame the debate in your own terms.