The country of Venezuela is in collapse. It is facing hyperinflation (last report 760% per anum) and shortages, which have resulted in The PanAm Post naming Mark Weisbrot the world's worst economist.
According to The Post, that Weisbrot is a long-time academic apologist fora misrule in Venezuela going back to the Hugo Chavez period.
The Post writes:
As Venezuela descends further into a dictatorship of starvation with each passing day, Mark Weisbrot remains surprisingly silent on his support for the Venezuelan regime and their economic policies. No Mark. This is not the economy of Greece or Spain. It is far worse. The apocalypse that you assured us would never come, is here.The Post is not exaggerating.
How do you turn Latin America’s wealthiest economy into its poorest in just one generation? The answer: socialism...
[Wesibrot] discarded the possibility of hyperinflation in Venezuela and ruled out the collapse of the country’s currency as well as the possibility of massive food shortages. Today, however, the Venezuelan regime faces serious difficulties paying its foreign debt while its citizens endure hyperinflation, a currency so devalued “it no longer fits in wallets“, and massive shortages of food and medicine. In other words, if economists could be sued for malpractice...there is surely no economist in America more deserving of such treatment than Mark Weisbrot.
In 2012, Weisbrot, wrote in the New York Times cheering on the policies that have now brought on the collapse
Since the Chávez government got control over the national oil industry, poverty has been cut in half, and extreme poverty by 70 percent. College enrollment has more than doubled, millions of people have access to health care for the first time and the number of people eligible for public pensions has quadrupled.Watch out for this guy. He lurks in Washington D.C. He is co-director, with Dean Baker, of the DC-based Center for Economic and Policy Research.
-RW
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