PanfletoNegro has always been one of those oddities of Venezuelan cyberspace: minimally managed, open for anyone to write in and “anarchic” in the etymological sense, the site ought to be awash in unreadable garbage. And yes, there’s some of that, but there’s also a surprising proportion of very readable garbage, as well as some stuff that…
It’s hard to pick out which is the more munificent of the money quotes in Katia Porzecanski’s Bloomberg piece about Wall Street investment banker types mobbing the Manhattan law offices of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP to grill the lawyers with “what ifs” about the Venezuela default they all expect. Is the most surprising detail that such…
On September 1st this year, Bs.87 would buy you $1 in Cúcuta. Today, those same 87 bolos will buy you 50 cents. That’s a 100% rise in the price of a black market dollar in just over one quarter. We know it’s bad, but do we know what it means from an economist’s point of view?…
News filtered down this week that, to try to help hanging-by-a-thread Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu, the outgoing Senate Democratic leadership may allow a vote on the Keystone XL pipeline during congress’s lame-duck session. This would give Landrieu one more chance to suck up to her voters by … once more screwing Venezuela. The same Landrieu who…
Caracas-based economist Asdrubal Oliveros recently estimated 130,000 barrels of gasoline are now smuggled across the border to Colombia each and every day. That’s a big number. How big? Well, assuming our men in uniform are bad at business and only make $65 per barrel sold (they’re wholesalers, after all), that would work out $8.5 million dollars every…
Caracas Chronicles 