Two articles with good, if depressing, content on the Venezuelan economy in local newspaper El Universal. First, in its front page editorial entitled “Special Interests” it says:
-In the last four years something very grave was added: the demential growth in internal public debt from 2.3 trillion bolivars in 1998 to 18.4 trillion bolivars today. This cocktail produces an amazing paradox: an economy that collapses by 18.9% in the first quarter, decimating thousands of companies and hundreds of thousands of jobs and families, a drop in the lending portfolio of 35% in real terms, a growth in its expenses and late payments and an exchange control which serves as a financial “corral” and forcefully induces the growth in deposits. However, banks pays less for deposits, increases its public debt portfolio to 11.2 trillion bolivars against only 7.7 trillion in loans, but its earnings jump up 41% to 805 billion bolivars in the first half of the year while paying only 27 billion bolivars in taxes, and continues acquiring Government paper feeding the destructive machinery of a regime which will end in a maxi devaluation.
The numbers and concepts are reinforced inside in an interview with the vocal president of Banco Venezolano de Credito, Oscar Garcia Mendoza, who with his usual sharpness and humor says things like:
-To tell you the truth this is a Government that is a Robin Hood backwards, it takes from the poor to pay interest to the bankers and the rich, but it feels the brazenness need to say that it is a regimen for the needy”
-According to the Ministry of Finance last year interest payments on internal debt were 3.1 trillion bolivars, while expenditures in social security and health only reached 1.5 trillion bolivars.
-A perverse effect ahs been created, there ahs been complicity, camaraderie between the banking system and the Government to place internal debt in these amounts. The terrible thing is that the state does not invest those resources in recovering hospitals, new roads or improve the quality of life, it simply covers current expenditures, generates more corruption and initiates a demagogue policy to stay in power at any price”
-This Government is condemned to not pay or devalue.
-We visited the western part of the country and we verified that the pumps are idle; of thirteen ships six or seven are not working, the companies in the Orinoco belt says PDVSA is not providing them with sufficient chemicals for the mix and transport of the extra heavy crudes, wells are overproducing, and a member of the Central Bank Board says that income is not yet up moth normal levels.
The Devil's Excrement 
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