South America

What Does Elemetal Imply for Precious Metals?

Venezuela, a country with only $10 billion left in reserves to run on, is in trouble. As the currency hyperinflates to new record lows against the dollar...

James Holbrooks points out that the people are starving. The government has gone full-on authoritarian, and now desperate human beings are dying in the streets. From an Associated Press report on Friday:

Update: according to Telesur, Lenin Moreno has won the Ecuadorian presidential election Sunday. With 94 percent of the vote counted, Lenin defeated former banker Guillermo Lasso, candidate for the right-wing alliance with 51.15 percent to 48.85 percent, according to results issued by the country’s National Electoral Council on Sunday at 8:20 p.m. The CNE said it was a transparent and successful election process. A victory for Moreno means that Assange will be safe from expulsion from Ecuador's London embassy  for the immediate future.

While investors had largely given Venezuela's economic catastrophe the benefit of the doubt for the past two years as crude collapsed and the country's CDS soared to record highs only to normalize subsequently, yesterday bond investors got very nervous for the first time in a while, as the Venezuela 9.25% of 2027 bonds crashed on fears a presidential coup may be imminent after Wednesday's decision by the pro-Maduro supreme court to assume the functions of congress, in effect making Venezuela a Maduro dictatorship.

Authored by Andrew Syrios via The Mises Institute,

Over the course of approximately six hours, the Left in the United States made a spectacular, 180 degree turn on federalism and states’ rights without even recognizing it. Although this lack of self-awareness shouldn’t be particularly surprising coming from the modern Left, which seems to have missed the irony when it goes about shutting down debates on free speech.