Can
you imagine lining up around the block overnight just to be able to
shop in a government-run, government-restricted grocery store where you
have to be fingerprintedto enter and then your food is allotted to you so that you can only buy a limited amount of a certain item each month?
As the sharp drop in oil prices continues to destroy Venezuela’s economy, the IMF, who owns large portions of the developing world, is now predicting inflation will skyrocket to 720% in Venezuela this year.
Food prices are hitting astronomical rates. Pretty soon, it’s looking like hardly anyone will be able to afford to eat.
The L.A. Times recently
interviewed a 42-year-old single mother who works as an accounting
assistant for the government ministry and lives in Caracas. She makes
27,000 bolivars, including a food allowance, each month. That would
equal $2,700 a month normally, but check out how much money she has to
spend these days on food and what she has to go through just to feed
her children.
In
December, she was spending about half her salary on groceries. It now
takes almost everything she earns to feed her two children, who subsist
on manioc (also known as cassava or yuca), eggs and cornmeal patties
called arepas, served with butter and plantains.
“The last time we had chicken was in December,” she said.
The best deals are generally at government-run stores, such as Mercal and Bicentenario, where the prices are regulated.
To
shop there, however, Linares said, she has to line up overnight. Even
then, she might come home empty-handed if everything sells out before
she gets to the front of the line — or if she is robbed leaving the
store.
“The
last time I bought food in a Mercal was three months ago,” she said.
“They sold me one kilo [2.2 pounds] of rice, a kilo of pasta, a kilo of
sugar and a liter of cooking oil for 1,540 bolivars. But to buy the
basket of regulated products, I had to buy a watermelon for 400
bolivars. I didn’t want the watermelon and didn’t have the extra money
to pay for it.”
These days, she buys most of her food from illegal street vendors known as bachaqueros.
The
cost of everything has skyrocketed. Eggs are now an astonishing $150 a
dozen. Powdered milk costs between 750 and 1000 bolivars now. Corn
flour, which is a staple in Venezuelan diets, went from 9.5 bolivars a
pound up to 95 a pound. And the prices for absolutely everything just
keep going up.
A
23-year-old named Alejandro who works at a law firm during the day and
teaches at night now makes the equivalent of $57 a month. He will
sometimes decide to splurge to buy butter, even though the price is now $2, or 4% of his monthly income.
Everyone
is buying from the black market because shopping at the
government-regulated grocery stores have become such a time-consuming
and restrictive process to deal with. They force people to buy sets of
items or extra items they can’t afford just to be able to buy the ones
they can. Many black market vendors will wait alongside everyone else in
the hours-long lines, buy up as many products as they can and turn
around and sell them on the black market for insane prices, leaving the
people who actually went to the stores to buy food for their families in
an even worse situation.
Shortages
on everything continue. Every basic toiletry, from shampoo to
toothpaste to toilet paper, is scarce if not impossible to find. Rolling
blackouts rock the nation, and some 85% of companies have cut back or
stopped production entirely. Foreign companies like Coca-Cola have shut
down their plants there and pulled out. Government employees are on a
strict government-ordered holiday, meaning they are down to working only
two days a week, which at least gives them enough time to spend hours
and hours in lines trying to buy food and basic necessities to continue
to survive.
The
question isn’t even how much longer is this going to last... the
question is whether or not people elsewhere are taking this situation
seriously and heeding the warnings of a society drowning in total
economic chaos. Venezuela is such an oil rich country. By all accounts, this shouldn’t be happening.
Surely
those people never thought something like this could happen to them,
just like if you asked your neighbor right now if he or she thinks this
could ever happen here... your neighbor would probably laugh at you.
31 May 2016
 We
are watching an entire nation collapse right in front of our eyes. As
you read this article, there are severe shortages of just about anything
you can imagine in Venezuela. That includes food, toilet paper,
medicine, electricity and even Coca-Cola. All over the country, people
are standing in extremely long lines for hours on end just hoping that
they will be able to purchase some provisions for their hungry
families. At times when there hasn’t been anything for the people that
have waited in those long lines, full-blown riots have broken out. All
of this is happening even though Venezuela has not been hit by a war, a
major natural disaster, a terror attack, an EMP burst or
any other type of significant “black swan” event. When debt spirals
out of control, currency manipulation goes too far and government
interference reaches ridiculous extremes, this is what can happen to an
economy. The following are 8 lessons that we can learn from the epic
economic meltdown in Venezuela...
“There’s
a shortage of everything at some level,” says Ricardo Cusanno, vice
president of Venezuela’s Chamber of Commerce. Cusanno says 85% of companies in Venezuela have halted production to some extent.
At this point, even Coca-Cola has shut down production due to a severe shortage of sugar.
#2 If you have not stored up food ahead of time, your diet could quickly become very simple during a major emergency. The Los Angeles Times recently
covered the plight of a 42-year-old single mother in Venezuela named
Maria Linares, and according to the story her family has not had any
chicken to eat since last December...
In
December, she was spending about half her salary on groceries. It now
takes almost everything she earns to feed her two children, who subsist
on manioc (also known as cassava or yuca), eggs and cornmeal patties
called arepas, served with butter and plantains.
“The last time we had chicken was in December,” she said.
The best deals are generally at government-run stores, such as Mercal and Bicentenario, where the prices are regulated.
To
shop there, however, Linares said, she has to line up overnight. Even
then, she might come home empty-handed if everything sells out before
she gets to the front of the line — or if she is robbed leaving the
store.
#3 When people get hungry, they become very desperate. And very desperate people will eat just about anything.
Could you ever do that?
I
couldn’t, but just like in Venezuela there are people in this nation
that will eat anything that they can get their hands on when they are
desperately hungry and their children are crying out for food.
Toiletries
are running in short supply across the country. Many Venezuelans say
that people wait in lines for several hours to buy basic toiletries,
only to sell them at much higher prices on the black market.
Bloomberg
reported last year that Trinidad & Tobago had offered to exchange
tissue paper for oil with Venezuela. It’s unclear if the deal ever came
through.
Condoms
and birth control are hard to find, Venezuelans say. You won’t have any
more luck with toothpaste, soap, toilet paper or shampoo. And Maduro
has asked women to stop using blow dryers.
What
would your life be like if you had no toothpaste, soap, toilet paper or
shampoo? If you do not want to do without those items in the future,
you might want to start stocking up on them now.
#5 If
you need medical care during a major economic meltdown, you might be
out of luck. Just consider what sick Venezuelans are going through right at this moment...
The Luis Razetti Hospital in the portal city of Barcelona looks like a war zone.
Patients can be seen balancing themselves on half-broken beds with days-old blood on their bodies.
They’re the lucky ones; most are curled up on the floor, blood streaming, limbs blackening.
Children lie among dirty cardboard boxes in the hallways without food, water or medication.
Without
electricity or functioning machines, medics have had to create their
own solutions. Two men who had surgery on their legs have their limbs
elevated by makeshift slings made out of water bottles.
#6 During
a currency meltdown, owning precious metals such as gold and silver
becomes much more important. This even applies to entire countries. So
far during this crisis, Venezuela has had to ship 2.3 billion dollars worth of gold to Switzerland because the bankers won’t take their paper currency any longer...
Venezuela’s
government has been running out of foreign reserves and literally
shipping gold to help pay for its debt. Venezuela only has $12.1 billion
in foreign reserves as of March, according to the most recent central
bank figures.
That’s down by half from a year ago. In
order to get cash loans to pay for its debt, Venezuela has shipped $2.3
billion of gold to Switzerland so far this year as collateral, according to Swiss government import data.
#7 When an economy crashes, crime goes through the roof. As I discussed the other day,
there were 107 major episodes of looting or attempted looting in the
first quarter of 2016 down in Venezuela, and things have gotten even
worse over the past couple of months.
Meanwhile, crime continues to rise in major cities all over America too. According to Breitbart,
66 people were shot in the city of Chicago over the Memorial day
weekend, and that was an all-time record. So far for the entire year, a
grand total of more than 1,500 people have been shot in Chicago, and
police are bracing for what promises to be a very chaotic summer.
#8 This
may be the most controversial lesson in the list. Sometimes it takes a
shaking to awaken a nation. Of course nobody really likes to go
through a shaking, but in the end it can have some very positive
results. Just look at what is happening in Caracas...
Churches in the capital Caracas recently organized a prayer walk. Thousands came to the main streets of the city crying out to God to ease their misery.
Under
the slogan “I pray for my country,” dozens of Christians marched and
prayed for unity of the church and for God to finally intervene to end
their country’s plight.
Will a similar shaking be necessary to bring America to her knees?
What is it ultimately going to take to bring about a widespread awakening in this country?
If you follow my work closely,
then you already know that I believe that a great shaking is coming to
the United States. In the end, it will be far more serious than what
Venezuela is going through right now, and it is going to shake this
nation to the very core.
But
a great shaking could turn out to be exactly what the United States
needs, because without a great shaking I don’t believe that there would
be a major awakening in America.
Or could it be possible that I am wrong about this?
|
The potential for a truly devastating economic collapse has been real for some time.
Though
most Americans are accustomed to having shelves full of food and goods,
and enough money to keep going, this sense of security is quite false.
The real economy is bottoming out, and the experts have been warning about the extreme stress in the system for some time.
Job
growth has stagnated, personal and institution debt is teetering on
edge and the central bank policies of the Federal Reserve have been
widening the gap between artificially-boosted corporate interests... and
all the rest who have been stymied by low-interest cash flowing to the
top of the pyramid at zero interest (and failing to trickle down).
While the United States seems miles apart from the implosion taking place in Venezuela, looks can be deceiving. Even former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan is admitting it.
It seems barely a day passes now without some big name person warning of imminent collapse. The latest is .
In an interview on Thursday
[Alan Greenspan] told Fox News that Venezuela is now under martial law
and that “America is next.” He said that what was happening in Venezuela
was inevitably going to take place in the US.
But
while we agree with Greenspan that crisis is coming to the US, that’s
where our agreement ends. We say it is coming to the US because
the conditions in the US are not that much different than Venezuela
– and the globalist plan is to turn the entire world into Venezuela.
Greenspan,
on the other hand... explained that the reason the US would end up like
Venezuela involved a “global problem of a shortage of productivity
growth.”
The
warning isn’t just that oil prices are rendering socialist economies
vulnerable, but that too much power in the hands a
central government and a central bank creates an inevitably unstable
situation.
All the dollars and all the paper money in the world can’t hold things together once things reach a certain point.
Things
are so far gone, that even the iconic faces of Federal Reserve are
addressing the problem, and redirecting blame for what is coming to most
of the people of the world.
Things
aren’t growing at all in Venezuela. In fact they are imploding at a
rate I’ve never personally witnessed before. But that isn’t the root
cause of the problem. The reason why Venezuela’s economy isn’t growing
is BECAUSE of the government and the central bank!
[...]
The main cause
of ruin over time is central bank money debasement – not some
mysterious missing “growth.” And government generally makes things worse
via regulations, taxation and debt.
[...]
Things are not going to get any better in 2016, only worse.
What is in the news today in Venezuela are
the events of the slow-motion long term collapse that is coming
globally, and will not spare the United States or its dependent
population of serfs.
What is happening will reach every part of the global economy... be ready.
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