12 ms·

Venezuela Follows India’s Example and Voids Half of Its Cash

known 10y ago
Adopt US dollar as your national currency; Here are all the countries that does it; http://qz.com/260980/meet-the-countries-that-dont-use-their-own-currency/ http://qz.com/260980/meet-the-countries-that-dont-use-their-...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- tomjen3 10y ago
  That would require Venezuela's politicians to do something sensible, which they have shown a remarkable desire to avoid at any cost.
- geofft 10y ago
  Are there countries that peg their currencies to combinations of other countries' currencies, mutual-fund-style, so you're not dependent on one single country's economy and politics remaining stable? I'd imagine that pegging your currency to, say, a linear combination of the UN Security Council members' currencies, weighted to get you about equal purchasing power on each currency, would be a good way to hedge risk. (Or is there a some economic reason this is a terrible idea?)
  - twelvechairs 10y ago
    China has done this. It has been pegged to a (somewhat secretive) basket of foreign currencies for some time. Before that it was pegged to USD.
    - jaza 10y ago
      That's right. Pegging a currency does of course have its advantages and disadvantages - in China's case, it's worked out very well for their economy (and for some groups of people in China, though certainly not for everyone). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renminbi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renminbi
    - rebuilder 10y ago
      Apparently, since January 2016, they switched back to a US peg. (According to Investopedia.)
  - viraptor 10y ago
    They'd still have to create a new currency that way. And you can't force a value on that one. Sure, it could have the value you want on paper, but just like the current one - it wouldn't match the usage in practice. Adopting another currency makes sense if it's easy to do a lot of trade using it. The closer you are to other $ users then, the closer the real value, because you can easily trade outside of the local bubble. (It could work of course (and did for some countries)... but you still need to have actual well working trade to make sure the currency has the value you expect)
  - AnAfrican 10y ago
    It's neither a good nor a bad idea. The point of pegging your currency to a foreign currency is to rebuild trust in your currency by guaranteeing a fixed exchange rate. But if you do that by pegging to multiple currencies that all have variable exchange rates, how do you handle the relative changes between them ? The only way would to be adjust it almost daily. Which is the same thing as letting it float. ++ PS: I'm talking about a somehow hard peg here. Most countries tend to use targets and will try to maintain some levels of rate. But they do so by operation on the market rather a peg by fiat.
- omegaworks 10y ago
  Peg your country's currency to one controlled by a foreign power. It turned out so well for Greece!
  - AnAfrican 10y ago
    It has turned out well for a bunch of countries. But only as a transition measure, to rebuild trust.
    - planteen 10y ago
      For example, Ecuador uses the US dollar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_of_Ecuador https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_of_Ecuador
- gozur88 10y ago
  You're missing the whole point of hyperinflation. The government is printing money to pay expenses, like salaries and military expenditures. If they adopted the dollar they'd lose the ability to do that.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    Is that really the main cause of their inflation? It's trivial to fix that cause; for example give each governmental department a budget that increases 5% per month and not a penny more.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - ufo 10y ago
      Yes, printing money is the root cause of the inflation. But no, you can't just make a trivial fix like you said. Venezuela has a dysfunctional government that used to be propped up by oil exports back when oil used to be a highly-priced commodity. After the crash in oil prices, the sorce of income dried up and revealed huge flaws in the country's infrastructure and government inefficiency and corruption.
      - Dylan16807 10y ago
        Printing no money is the default option. Dysfunction and corruption certainly make fixing everything extremely difficult, but you don't have to fix the government to stop the hyperinflation. If you cut off access to whatever printing press or computer is making the money, then there would not be hyperinflation. It being an insufficient fix does not stop it from being trivial and performing its stated goal.
        ufo 10y ago
        Stopping the flow of money without restructuring the government would result in a total government shutdown and complete chaos. It is not an option.
firekvz 10y ago
I really can't understand how this article misses entirely the actual news here "Venezuela is issuing a full new set of notes and is replacing 100 VEF bills (the biggest we had) for a coin" So far we had this (in VEF): - Coins for: 0.05, 0.1, 0.125, 0.5 and 1 - Bills for: 2, 5, 10, 20, 50 and 100 now we will have (in VEF): - Coins for: 10, 20, 50 and 100 - Bills for: 500, 1.000, 2.000, 5.000, 10.000 and 20.000 So thats about it, the gov is finally accepting that we have a huge inflation and the old bank notes can't be used any more (in terms of convenience) so they are exchanging our current biggest bank note of 100 for other sizes but is nowhere mentioned in the article Of course all the previous bank notes (from the old set) are being banned because they are being taking out of circulation mostly because the DESING IS THE SAME (just a recolore) and can cause confusions, here you can see a comparation: - old desing: http://runrun.es/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/venezuela-bolivar-fuerte.jpg http://runrun.es/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/venezuela-boliva... - new desing: http://imgs.globovision.com/2Io-ZrCgwYEjgOw-dGsi6ndh1WM=/700x0/smart/e3ccb1d95ed74a8a919e4bec4f0c2375 http://imgs.globovision.com/2Io-ZrCgwYEjgOw-dGsi6ndh1WM=/700... In resume this is actual good news for venezuelans because even tho we still suffer all the problems we have, at least we get to avoid carrying 1 kilo of 100 VEF notes to make a purchase, we can just pay with 1 20.000 bill.
- toast0 10y ago
  > Of course all the previous bank notes (from the old set) are being banned because they are being taking out of circulation. Being taken out of circulation doesn't require being banned. Plenty of US currency is no longer circulated but it's still legal tender. Pre-Euro currency is no longer legal tender, but many notes and coins are still exchangable for Euros, almost 15 years after Euros were introduced.
  - firekvz 10y ago
    Yeah you are right but it's just how they did it in here. They gave people 15 days to exchange the bank notes for smaller ones or deposit their old notes in the banks or exchange for new ones, we can all agree that this looks like a really small period of time but due to the nature of our economy it's actually a decent time. But the bill is not really "banned" it will be tho and I will explain you the reasons a bit later. In my case, I deposited all my 100 notes without any problems by monday. I just use debit/credit cards now and other small notes to make cheap purchases. It's incredible hard to find actual correct information on whats going on because all the media is focused in creating chaos and missinformation, this is an actual good source where you can see the explanation of why only the 100 notes are being replaced on this 1st phase http://www.analitica.com/economia/canje-de-billetes-en-banca-publica-y-privada-se-extendera-10-dias-mas/ http://www.analitica.com/economia/canje-de-billetes-en-banca... But an small resume is that only the 100 VEF notes are being replaced now because they represent the biggest percent over all the notes (is around 50%) so people will want to have a bill of 20.000 instead of 200 bills of 100 VEF. Once the 500, 1.000, 5.000, 10.000, 20.000 notes are around, they will finish replacing the other small notes 10, 20, 50 and 100 leftovers for coins. But well, as I said before, the media has started a campaing to make people belive that right now their money will have no value at all and a bunch of other lies, this of course leads to desperation and to problems like we had today where there was violence at diferent banks around the country. And to explain why the bill will be banned after 15 days is pretty simple, the money in this country has a super high rotation, bills NEVER sit in your pocket or your wallet for more than 1 hour, aditional to this, money in cash is barely used now, a huge percent of the transactions are made electronically because is just not confortable to have a pack of 300 bills to buy food for 3-4 days so cash is actually not really used because of high inflation So yeah if after 15 days you still have bill leftover you pretty much were into corruption, drugs, money laundering, smuggling, etc and thats exactly what the gov wants to avoid, to all those guys who spend years smuggling in the borders and have containers or warehouses full of 100 VEF notes. Take a look of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p23Fn1LVGv0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p23Fn1LVGv0 This is an asian guy (well known to have smugglings business) showing how many 100 VEF bills he had, it's just hillarious.
partycoder 10y ago
Rather than voiding it, they force it out of circulation by giving a deadline that requires people to deposit it in a bank.
- jimmywanger 10y ago
  > they force it out of circulation by giving a deadline that requires people to deposit it in a bank. Do you know what circulation means in this context? If the money is in a bank, it's still in circulation, you can use your ATM card to pay for stuff with it. You just don't have the bill on you, but the money is still floating around.
prashnts 10y ago
Few points of comparison from India [1] - Population: 30.8 million vs 1.29 billion - Internet usage: 61.87% vs 26% of population - GDP: $371.3 billion vs $2.074 trillion I think it's far easier/achievable by Venezuela to implement than it has been for India. [1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=venezuela+vs+india https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=venezuela+vs+india
- aub3bhat 10y ago
  I think you are way off and quoting meaningless number without having any clue. What does Internet usage or Population has to do with an economic move? There is only one number that matters and its inflation 500% as of April 2016. Venezuela is suffering from hyperinflation and scarcity. http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/12/news/economy/venezuela-imf-economy/ http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/12/news/economy/venezuela-imf-e... India on other hand is going through a period of robust growth, with inflation well within limits. Even the worst projection show that the demonetisation will reduce india's growth rate from 6% to 4% for at most couple of quarters. 4% is still considered quite a good growth rate. Actually the worst phase of demonetisation is already over. In 30 days everything will be back to normal.
  - kranner 10y ago
    > Actually the worst phase of demonetisation is already over. In 30 days everything will be back to normal. Even the government doesn't think things will be back to normal in 30 days. According to the finance minister, it will take 1-2 quarters. http://www.businessinsider.in/Effect-of-demonetisation-will-remain-for-one-or-two-quarters-Jaitley/articleshow/55726173.cms http://www.businessinsider.in/Effect-of-demonetisation-will-...
    - tmbsundar 10y ago
      The "worst phase" that is, not "the effect". I think the OP meant the "cash crunch / unavailability of 500 INR notes/ ATMS running out of cash etc.,". The effect may take at least a quarter to ease down. [1] http://www.deccanchronicle.com/business/economy/161216/cash-crunch-to-end-by-mid-january-says-amitabh-kant.html http://www.deccanchronicle.com/business/economy/161216/cash-...
grabcocque 10y ago
So far Venezuela continues to follow the hyperinflation playbook with depressing obedience.
dingo_bat 10y ago
I don't think there is any similarity between the two events. The reasons are entirely different. The time has coincided somewhat.
azov 10y ago
USSR did a similar reform in 1991, so called Pavlov Reform. There were three days to exchange 100 RUR bills (the largest bill in circulation) and there was a limit on how much one could exchange. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_reform_in_the_Soviet_Union,_1991 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_reform_in_the_Sovie...
edblarney 10y ago
"our media is intervened by the goverment." This is not true at all. There is some relationship between press and gov. but Barack Obama is in no way censoring CNN, Fox form publishing stories about bank robberies. The 'real reason' that they don't is because their readership just does not care. Fox News has been bashing Venezuela for years, it's crazy to suggest 'the government' is suppressing them from publishing negative stories about Venezuela. That said - I personally wish there was more coverage.
- thnnb 10y ago
  Dude what are you on, I want some. Obama, CNN, Fox and the whole US are on topic as much as the Lochness monster.
  - edblarney 10y ago
    They are 'on' subjects people care about enough to click. Nobody cares about the specifics of Venezuelan currency exchange. So they don't cover it. It's absurd to suggest they are 'not covering it' because the US government is intervening on that issue. Totally absurd. Canada is the US #1 trading partner, and how much coverage do you see about Canada? None. We have a new Prime Minister and it barely makes the news. We have major trade disputes on going - zero coverage. Because nobody cares. Trump, Taylor Swift, the current SJW meme, and the last 'shooting' and whatever is trending on Twitter is what they cover. There is a war going on in Mosul, Americans involved, and since the start of that action there's been zero coverage. It's because people don't care enough. That's it. There's no conspiracy. You want details on Mosul go to AlJazeera. You want details on Canada go to the CBC. etc.
    - thnnb 10y ago
      When I said "our media is intervened by the government" I meant -local- media in Venezuela, under direct influence of Venezuela's government. Local TV channels (Globovisión, Televen, VTV...), local newspapers, local radio stations, etc. I do get the point that US media doesn't cover our stories in detail because US audiences aren't that interested, I just don't understand why you keep pointing that out in this context.
future1979 10y ago
I'm very sorry for the common folks in Venezuela. Can anyone shed light on how life goes on in these situations? It seems that basically all ones savings would get wiped out. A reasonable first response for those with cash would be to buy physical assets - property, cows, cars, etc. But why would anyone sell those?
jestinjoy1 10y ago
God save people of Venezuela. From India.
ksjdj 10y ago
Classy governments do this slowly over a long period of time.
sctb 10y ago
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13196150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13196150

known 10y ago

Adopt US dollar as your national currency; Here are all the countries that does it; http://qz.com/260980/meet-the-countries-that-dont-use-their-own-currency/ http://qz.com/260980/meet-the-countries-that-dont-use-their-...

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
tomjen3 10y ago
That would require Venezuela's politicians to do something sensible, which they have shown a remarkable desire to avoid at any cost.
geofft 10y ago
Are there countries that peg their currencies to combinations of other countries' currencies, mutual-fund-style, so you're not dependent on one single country's economy and politics remaining stable? I'd imagine that pegging your currency to, say, a linear combination of the UN Security Council members' currencies, weighted to get you about equal purchasing power on each currency, would be a good way to hedge risk. (Or is there a some economic reason this is a terrible idea?)
- twelvechairs 10y ago
  China has done this. It has been pegged to a (somewhat secretive) basket of foreign currencies for some time. Before that it was pegged to USD.
  - jaza 10y ago
    That's right. Pegging a currency does of course have its advantages and disadvantages - in China's case, it's worked out very well for their economy (and for some groups of people in China, though certainly not for everyone). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renminbi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renminbi
  - rebuilder 10y ago
    Apparently, since January 2016, they switched back to a US peg. (According to Investopedia.)
- viraptor 10y ago
  They'd still have to create a new currency that way. And you can't force a value on that one. Sure, it could have the value you want on paper, but just like the current one - it wouldn't match the usage in practice. Adopting another currency makes sense if it's easy to do a lot of trade using it. The closer you are to other $ users then, the closer the real value, because you can easily trade outside of the local bubble. (It could work of course (and did for some countries)... but you still need to have actual well working trade to make sure the currency has the value you expect)
- AnAfrican 10y ago
  It's neither a good nor a bad idea. The point of pegging your currency to a foreign currency is to rebuild trust in your currency by guaranteeing a fixed exchange rate. But if you do that by pegging to multiple currencies that all have variable exchange rates, how do you handle the relative changes between them ? The only way would to be adjust it almost daily. Which is the same thing as letting it float. ++ PS: I'm talking about a somehow hard peg here. Most countries tend to use targets and will try to maintain some levels of rate. But they do so by operation on the market rather a peg by fiat.
omegaworks 10y ago
Peg your country's currency to one controlled by a foreign power. It turned out so well for Greece!
- AnAfrican 10y ago
  It has turned out well for a bunch of countries. But only as a transition measure, to rebuild trust.
  - planteen 10y ago
    For example, Ecuador uses the US dollar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_of_Ecuador https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_of_Ecuador
gozur88 10y ago
You're missing the whole point of hyperinflation. The government is printing money to pay expenses, like salaries and military expenditures. If they adopted the dollar they'd lose the ability to do that.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  Is that really the main cause of their inflation? It's trivial to fix that cause; for example give each governmental department a budget that increases 5% per month and not a penny more.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - ufo 10y ago
    Yes, printing money is the root cause of the inflation. But no, you can't just make a trivial fix like you said. Venezuela has a dysfunctional government that used to be propped up by oil exports back when oil used to be a highly-priced commodity. After the crash in oil prices, the sorce of income dried up and revealed huge flaws in the country's infrastructure and government inefficiency and corruption.
    - Dylan16807 10y ago
      Printing no money is the default option. Dysfunction and corruption certainly make fixing everything extremely difficult, but you don't have to fix the government to stop the hyperinflation. If you cut off access to whatever printing press or computer is making the money, then there would not be hyperinflation. It being an insufficient fix does not stop it from being trivial and performing its stated goal.
      - ufo 10y ago
        Stopping the flow of money without restructuring the government would result in a total government shutdown and complete chaos. It is not an option.

firekvz 10y ago

I really can't understand how this article misses entirely the actual news here "Venezuela is issuing a full new set of notes and is replacing 100 VEF bills (the biggest we had) for a coin" So far we had this (in VEF): - Coins for: 0.05, 0.1, 0.125, 0.5 and 1 - Bills for: 2, 5, 10, 20, 50 and 100 now we will have (in VEF): - Coins for: 10, 20, 50 and 100 - Bills for: 500, 1.000, 2.000, 5.000, 10.000 and 20.000 So thats about it, the gov is finally accepting that we have a huge inflation and the old bank notes can't be used any more (in terms of convenience) so they are exchanging our current biggest bank note of 100 for other sizes but is nowhere mentioned in the article Of course all the previous bank notes (from the old set) are being banned because they are being taking out of circulation mostly because the DESING IS THE SAME (just a recolore) and can cause confusions, here you can see a comparation: - old desing: http://runrun.es/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/venezuela-bolivar-fuerte.jpg http://runrun.es/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/venezuela-boliva... - new desing: http://imgs.globovision.com/2Io-ZrCgwYEjgOw-dGsi6ndh1WM=/700x0/smart/e3ccb1d95ed74a8a919e4bec4f0c2375 http://imgs.globovision.com/2Io-ZrCgwYEjgOw-dGsi6ndh1WM=/700... In resume this is actual good news for venezuelans because even tho we still suffer all the problems we have, at least we get to avoid carrying 1 kilo of 100 VEF notes to make a purchase, we can just pay with 1 20.000 bill.

toast0 10y ago
> Of course all the previous bank notes (from the old set) are being banned because they are being taking out of circulation. Being taken out of circulation doesn't require being banned. Plenty of US currency is no longer circulated but it's still legal tender. Pre-Euro currency is no longer legal tender, but many notes and coins are still exchangable for Euros, almost 15 years after Euros were introduced.
- firekvz 10y ago
  Yeah you are right but it's just how they did it in here. They gave people 15 days to exchange the bank notes for smaller ones or deposit their old notes in the banks or exchange for new ones, we can all agree that this looks like a really small period of time but due to the nature of our economy it's actually a decent time. But the bill is not really "banned" it will be tho and I will explain you the reasons a bit later. In my case, I deposited all my 100 notes without any problems by monday. I just use debit/credit cards now and other small notes to make cheap purchases. It's incredible hard to find actual correct information on whats going on because all the media is focused in creating chaos and missinformation, this is an actual good source where you can see the explanation of why only the 100 notes are being replaced on this 1st phase http://www.analitica.com/economia/canje-de-billetes-en-banca-publica-y-privada-se-extendera-10-dias-mas/ http://www.analitica.com/economia/canje-de-billetes-en-banca... But an small resume is that only the 100 VEF notes are being replaced now because they represent the biggest percent over all the notes (is around 50%) so people will want to have a bill of 20.000 instead of 200 bills of 100 VEF. Once the 500, 1.000, 5.000, 10.000, 20.000 notes are around, they will finish replacing the other small notes 10, 20, 50 and 100 leftovers for coins. But well, as I said before, the media has started a campaing to make people belive that right now their money will have no value at all and a bunch of other lies, this of course leads to desperation and to problems like we had today where there was violence at diferent banks around the country. And to explain why the bill will be banned after 15 days is pretty simple, the money in this country has a super high rotation, bills NEVER sit in your pocket or your wallet for more than 1 hour, aditional to this, money in cash is barely used now, a huge percent of the transactions are made electronically because is just not confortable to have a pack of 300 bills to buy food for 3-4 days so cash is actually not really used because of high inflation So yeah if after 15 days you still have bill leftover you pretty much were into corruption, drugs, money laundering, smuggling, etc and thats exactly what the gov wants to avoid, to all those guys who spend years smuggling in the borders and have containers or warehouses full of 100 VEF notes. Take a look of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p23Fn1LVGv0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p23Fn1LVGv0 This is an asian guy (well known to have smugglings business) showing how many 100 VEF bills he had, it's just hillarious.

partycoder 10y ago

Rather than voiding it, they force it out of circulation by giving a deadline that requires people to deposit it in a bank.

jimmywanger 10y ago
> they force it out of circulation by giving a deadline that requires people to deposit it in a bank. Do you know what circulation means in this context? If the money is in a bank, it's still in circulation, you can use your ATM card to pay for stuff with it. You just don't have the bill on you, but the money is still floating around.

prashnts 10y ago

Few points of comparison from India [1] - Population: 30.8 million vs 1.29 billion - Internet usage: 61.87% vs 26% of population - GDP: $371.3 billion vs $2.074 trillion I think it's far easier/achievable by Venezuela to implement than it has been for India. [1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=venezuela+vs+india https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=venezuela+vs+india

aub3bhat 10y ago
I think you are way off and quoting meaningless number without having any clue. What does Internet usage or Population has to do with an economic move? There is only one number that matters and its inflation 500% as of April 2016. Venezuela is suffering from hyperinflation and scarcity. http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/12/news/economy/venezuela-imf-economy/ http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/12/news/economy/venezuela-imf-e... India on other hand is going through a period of robust growth, with inflation well within limits. Even the worst projection show that the demonetisation will reduce india's growth rate from 6% to 4% for at most couple of quarters. 4% is still considered quite a good growth rate. Actually the worst phase of demonetisation is already over. In 30 days everything will be back to normal.
- kranner 10y ago
  > Actually the worst phase of demonetisation is already over. In 30 days everything will be back to normal. Even the government doesn't think things will be back to normal in 30 days. According to the finance minister, it will take 1-2 quarters. http://www.businessinsider.in/Effect-of-demonetisation-will-remain-for-one-or-two-quarters-Jaitley/articleshow/55726173.cms http://www.businessinsider.in/Effect-of-demonetisation-will-...
  - tmbsundar 10y ago
    The "worst phase" that is, not "the effect". I think the OP meant the "cash crunch / unavailability of 500 INR notes/ ATMS running out of cash etc.,". The effect may take at least a quarter to ease down. [1] http://www.deccanchronicle.com/business/economy/161216/cash-crunch-to-end-by-mid-january-says-amitabh-kant.html http://www.deccanchronicle.com/business/economy/161216/cash-...

grabcocque 10y ago

So far Venezuela continues to follow the hyperinflation playbook with depressing obedience.

dingo_bat 10y ago

I don't think there is any similarity between the two events. The reasons are entirely different. The time has coincided somewhat.

azov 10y ago

USSR did a similar reform in 1991, so called Pavlov Reform. There were three days to exchange 100 RUR bills (the largest bill in circulation) and there was a limit on how much one could exchange. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_reform_in_the_Soviet_Union,_1991 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_reform_in_the_Sovie...

edblarney 10y ago

"our media is intervened by the goverment." This is not true at all. There is some relationship between press and gov. but Barack Obama is in no way censoring CNN, Fox form publishing stories about bank robberies. The 'real reason' that they don't is because their readership just does not care. Fox News has been bashing Venezuela for years, it's crazy to suggest 'the government' is suppressing them from publishing negative stories about Venezuela. That said - I personally wish there was more coverage.

thnnb 10y ago
Dude what are you on, I want some. Obama, CNN, Fox and the whole US are on topic as much as the Lochness monster.
- edblarney 10y ago
  They are 'on' subjects people care about enough to click. Nobody cares about the specifics of Venezuelan currency exchange. So they don't cover it. It's absurd to suggest they are 'not covering it' because the US government is intervening on that issue. Totally absurd. Canada is the US #1 trading partner, and how much coverage do you see about Canada? None. We have a new Prime Minister and it barely makes the news. We have major trade disputes on going - zero coverage. Because nobody cares. Trump, Taylor Swift, the current SJW meme, and the last 'shooting' and whatever is trending on Twitter is what they cover. There is a war going on in Mosul, Americans involved, and since the start of that action there's been zero coverage. It's because people don't care enough. That's it. There's no conspiracy. You want details on Mosul go to AlJazeera. You want details on Canada go to the CBC. etc.
  - thnnb 10y ago
    When I said "our media is intervened by the government" I meant -local- media in Venezuela, under direct influence of Venezuela's government. Local TV channels (Globovisión, Televen, VTV...), local newspapers, local radio stations, etc. I do get the point that US media doesn't cover our stories in detail because US audiences aren't that interested, I just don't understand why you keep pointing that out in this context.

future1979 10y ago

I'm very sorry for the common folks in Venezuela. Can anyone shed light on how life goes on in these situations? It seems that basically all ones savings would get wiped out. A reasonable first response for those with cash would be to buy physical assets - property, cows, cars, etc. But why would anyone sell those?

jestinjoy1 10y ago

God save people of Venezuela. From India.

ksjdj 10y ago

Classy governments do this slowly over a long period of time.

sctb 10y ago

Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13196150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13196150