Venezuela is on the brink of a complete economic collapse | Hacker News Reader

Venezuela is on the brink of a complete economic collapse

washingtonpost.com

30 pointstemp13 comments

Venezuela has a history of making companies hard to run locally.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-09-22/clorox-pul...

Apparently, they tried to make bleach cost less than it takes to make it, and after shutting down, the government took over the building and started selling bleach under the Clorox name without permission or license.

can anyone fact check this claim?

"Chávez turned the state-owned oil company from being professionally run to being barely run. People who knew what they were doing were replaced with people who were loyal to the regime, and profits came out but new investment didn't go in"

Fact check no, but it does sound vaguely familiar. Can't quite place it though.

Do a Google search. When Chavez came in he nationalized a number of oil companies. Those companies left the country and took a lot of people with them. When oil prices started to drop, he cut spending on maintenance.

Towards the end of 2002, there was a general strike in Venezuela, where, most importantly, a large percentage of PDVSA's workforce was on strike and oil production basically halted. Chavez went ahead and fired 18,000 people (skilled oil industry workers) after the strike in one fell swoop. Those workers were replaced with workers loyal to the regime. Basically, everyone who opposed the government was fired from PDVSA.

Many of those skilled fired employees found themselves unable to work and left Venezuela to other countries, notably Colombia, which later experience a surge in its oil industry.

Source: I'm Venezuelan... But here's an article that talks about this: http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21607824-venezuelas-l...

And here in the USA we have our own chavez, Donald Trump. It Is really incredible how an incompetent, corrupt and criminal leader can destroy a country. I can see the potential for something like that happening here with Donald Trump.

Bush already did manage to screw the country with his policies. Imagine how bad it would be under trump.

I think that Bernie, as a self-proclaimed socialist, would pursue Chavez-like policies, not Trump.

First of all, Wow! So many downvotes. I dare anybody to say that wha I said is untrue.

My comparison with chavez and trump has more to do with character. Both would say anything to get elected and blame everybody else for their problems. Horrible politicians without any principles.

Downvotes probably because, as much as I see people disliking Donald Trump here, we simply disagree with your comparison.

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