It will be very interesting to compare the next couple years of Brazil with Venezuela - Mark Perry sums it up in one excellent chart at the American Enterprise Institute:
The collapse of Venezuela’s socialism in one chart
The chart above shows the collapse of oil production in socialist Venezuela, the country with the world’s largest oil reserves, that is accompanying the overall economic collapse there. A decade ago, the Bakken oil fields in western North Dakota were producing an insignificant amount of crude oil — only 132,000 barrels per day, while at the same time Venezuela was producing 2.5 million barrels per day, or about half of America’s 5 million barrels per day.
Fast forward ten years to today through the US Shale Revolution fueled by revolutionary Made-in-the-USA capitalist technologies, and the economic collapse in socialist Venezuela and we now find that the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota have produced more crude oil than Venezuela for the last two months of production data (August and September). A pretty amazing turnaround in a decade that just one of America’s oil fields in one state is now out-producing the country sitting on the largest oil reserves in the world — Venezuela has about 300 billion barrels, or more than 8 times America’s reserves of about 36.5 billion barrels. And with America’s daily oil production reaching record levels of 11 million barrels recently, Venezuela’s daily production of only 1.2 million barrels is now less than 11% of US crude output.
And what is most tragic about the socialist meltdown in Venezuela is not the collapse of oil production, but the collapse of the human spirit there and the tragic toll it’s taking on the Venezuelan people, many of whom are becoming so hopeless that suicide seems like the best solution. See the Bloomberg article “Suicides Surge in a Hopeless Venezuela: The desperate act is becoming ordinary in a population plagued by hyperinflation, hunger and mass emigration.”
Once a wonderful vibrant nation with great fishing, agriculture and the worlds largest known petroleum reserves (still is). Brought to her knees by a failed political ideology - socialism has never worked when it has been tried. There will always be a wealthy elite who control the government handouts to keep the proles in their place. Panem et Circenses
Nicolas Maduro is personally worth about $2 billion. Hugo Chavez' daughter Maria has about $4 billion in the bank.
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