Maduro has no clue how to react to lower oil prices.

doubling down on stupid.


I wonder when the Chavista supporters will show up and tell us how this time price controls will work?

I wonder how long the populace of that country will put up with the finger pointing. At this point people are using money for napkins because its cheaper.

fixing a flat tire by putting more holes in the tire.

to virtually worthless Bolivars. If they want real revenue, they'll have to increase the price outside of Venezuela so they can get hard currency.

perhaps China bought from them for decades and paid a very low price? Now (I think) China made a deal with Putin to buy crude from him. Russia is very crude oil/gas dependent on export revenue too.

Maybe Venzuela can refine to gasoline and sell higher in their own country and much higher for export.

Or perhaps undercut the price for barrel global price? and seek new customers. It's a huge problem for a country that totally depended on their crude oil sales.

They want to raise global prices so they get more revenue. China has given Venezuela various loans that are paid back through oil. With the low price of oil, they must divert more of it to China for the loan repayments.

Venezuela also lacks refining capability for their crude due to government management ineptitude. It must be refined outside of the country. They actually must import gasoline.

They should find investors and build a refinery. They have vast quantities of quality crude. They can refine in place. It's not rocket science.

Nothing says I hate you like manipulating oil prices.

"Take your goods and services elsewhere" like price controls.

Capitalism may not be perfect, but having an iron grip on the market always leads to disaster.

You have absolutely no evidence that a socialist system controlling markets is a disaster. Just look at China (though they are communist). If it works for some communist countries why would it NOT work for some Socialist countries? And NO, the Soviet Union was NOT socialist.

Capitalism is all about scams and abuse. It's never ever about fair competition. If it's so great why does it crash all the time???????

Price controls generally don't work. You can't just say, "milk is going to be $1.00 per gallon" and expect businesses to want to do business there. Why would someone want to set up a business where they can't make a profit?

They were actually tried as far back as the Romans. They were a complete failure back then too. Even extremely Liberal economists agree that price controls either promote inflation, or only stall it for a short period of time.

Price controls were also tried in Peru in 1985. This caused a black market for goods, hyperinflation, and massive breadlines. They were universally regarded as a failure. Even Peru agrees.

Historically, price controls have almost always lead to civil strife, hunger, and shortages. It's one of the best ways to actually encourage inflation, as well as destroying an economy. They're usually a act of populist desperation.

Btw., China has removed most of its price controls. Those were only supposed to be short term. They have actually hurt Chinese businesses' ability to grow.

It's amusing how fanatical leftists know nothing about economics 101. Sorry to break it to you, buddy, but Maduro is taking such measures as said on this article, and they're only gonna serve to bury himself and his crony friends even deeper. I can find you the video itself of him announcing it if you want, with translation (I'm Venezuelan myself, by the way )

He blames others but his government and his policies are Venezuela's biggest enemy.

He thinks that if he just double downs on a failed policy, it'll suddenly start working. Fucking idiot....

I'd say "30% profit" is very generous for any Wholesale or Retail business to earn off sales of life necessities like toilet paper.

It's not an implication of what he said, it's a conversational or pragmatic implicature.

You assume that he's saying something relevant and therefore you think you know what he's asserting. He's not asserting what you're inferring.


It's a standard trick among politicians, lawyers, and used-car salesmen--anybody that wants to talk and talk, say nothing necessarily false, but make you believe utterly false things.

"This car has 30k miles on it." Well, yes, it actually has 130k miles on it, which logically entails it also has 30k miles on it. But you infer "this car has only 30k miles on it" because one of the rules of implicature is to say pretty much all that's relevant. We "hear" this as a lie, but it's not if conversation is taken to follow logic.

To late now of course but they can still undercut the price per barrel today and start gaining revenue.

Because crude oil is a buyers market today. The world is glutted with crude oil and the technology to drill it or refine it from shale.

If they can't get it together to undercut the other crude oil sellers and grab some of the shrinking market then it's back to the 1900s for that country.

to be run by the state. Its been a disaster.

The Venezuela government wants crude prices to increase, not decrease. They do not want to sell more of their oil for less, they want to sell more of their oil for more.

And this is coming from a Venezuelan, by the way (I was born and raised in Caracas.) At this point, oil presents a curse rather than a gift. It makes for very easy revenue for a country that does not have a good enough system of checks and balances to ensure that the revenue from the oil is actually used for the betterment of the country instead of going into the personal bank accounts of the central government. Instead it's mostly been funneled into the pockets of the top Chavistas, leaving the country almost broke while they make themselves multimillionaires (one only need to look at all the luxurious lifestyles of the top Chavista leaders and their brownosing business partners, also known as "enchufados.&quot

The Norwegians have made it work with their oil industry. They've managed to use that revenue wisely and they enjoy some of the highest quality of life in the world. Venezuela, though, is way too corrupt at this point to have its own oil revenue be used wisely. And if it didn't exist at all, maybe that would force all parties to actually focus on diversifying the economy and actually work efficiently. A national oil industry under a corrupt government has only made the country more and more dependent on this one product, and now the nation its facing the consequences of this severe lack of foresight, especially since now almost every other major industry has been left in ruin thanks to the idiotic and unjustified expropriation of most private-sector businesses.