Super Socialist to the rescue!
Socialists have the IQ of an amoeba - and that is being generous.
Swamped in Inflation, Venezuela Will Cut Five Zeros from Currency
http://www.wral.com/swamped-in-inflation-venezuela-will-cut-five-zeros-from-currency/17774600/
Faced with nearly incomprehensible inflation - 32,714 percent as of Wednesday - Venezuelan officials thought they had a solution: They changed the color of the bank notes and increased their denomination. Then they said they would lop off three zeros. And when that didn't seem enough, they announced they would cut off two more.
The tactics have left Venezuelans like Yosmar Nowak, the owner of a coffee shop in Caracas, convinced that there is no solution in sight and that the government cannot even bring down the price of a cup of coffee, an eye-watering 2 million bolivars.
"I imagine if we keep like this we're going to have to do the same thing in December," said Nowak, who has been forced to raise prices in her cafe at least 40 times this year.
Slashing zeros from Venezuela's inflation-cursed currency, the bolivar, is the tent-pole of a set of economic changes by President Nicolás Maduro as he tries to right his country's capsized economy. The five-digit inflation has earned Venezuela comparisons to the hyperinflation of Zimbabwe and Weimar Germany from the International Monetary Fund.
The newly minted currency, which will be known as the "sovereign bolÃvar," will be rolled out Monday. In addition, the president has ordered measures his United Socialist Party has been loath to consider in the past: An increase in gas prices for some drivers and a modest ease in the currency controls that have made dollars inaccessible to most Venezuelans for years.
Yet these changes haven't been enough to convince economists, who see desperation in Maduro's latest moves and view the new currency as another chapter in the decades of mismanagement that have destroyed the Venezuelan economy.
"It's a cosmetic thing that's happening, the zeros," said Steve Hanke, an applied economics professor at Johns Hopkins University who has advised governments facing hyperinflation. "It means nothing unless you change economic policy."
By removing the zeros, Maduro is looking to solve what economists call hyperinflation's "wheelbarrow problem" - the point when the currency has become so worthless that a wheelbarrow of cash is necessary to make purchases.
The new currency, which will be phased in as the old one is phased out, would bring the price of that cup of coffee at Nowak's shop down to the more manageable sum of 20 sovereign bolivars. But few think that price will hold for long.
"We're expecting an increase in more than 1,000 percent for the minimum wage, and of course, more inflation," Nowak said. The tumult is so great, she said, "we're not going to open Monday."
The problem isn't to do with the zeros, but rather what's causing them to appear. The Venezuelan government depends on sales from its state oil company to pay its debts. But mismanagement allowed production to sink to 1.2 million barrels a day in July - on par with the monthly rate in 1947.
Faced with this shortage, the government turns to the Central Bank to order more money printed. While that may pay the government's bills in the short term, it comes at the expense of everyone who owns bolÃvars, as the surplus of printed cash makes existing money increasingly worthless. ...
The real problem is that Socialism kills - it kills incentive, businesses, whole economies, and people.
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. ~ D.H. Lawrence
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