Venezuela

After years of rationing and food shortages Venezuela has announced that the country does not have enough food to feed its population – declaring a national “nutritional emergency” throughout the country.  The lack of food comes amid an economic collapse that has now reached a point that threatens the lives of people living in Venezuela. Zengardner.com reports: Many people expect an economic collapse to be shocking, instant, and dramatic, but really, it’s far more gradual than that.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has been working on some “measures.”

“Now that the economic emergency decree has validity, in the next few days I will activate a series of measures I had been working on,” he said Thursday, in a televised statement meant to address a “food emergency” declared by Congress.

The “validity” Maduro references comes from a high court ruling that gives the President expanded powers to tackle a deepening economic crisis that’s left hospitals without medicine and grocery stores bereft of food.

Last Thursday when we recounted the story of how Venezuela is now literally flying in paper money (using three dozen cargo Boeing 747s), we wrote that "Venezuela's hyperinflation, already tentatively estimated at 720%, will likely add on a few (hundred) zeroes by this time next year. It is also quite likely that Venezuela the country, as we know it now, will no longer exist because once any nation is swept up in hyperinflationary rapids two things occur like clockwork: social uprisings and political coups.

The weeks ago, when we showed "What The Death Of A Nation Looks Like: Venezuela Prepares For 720% Hyperinflation", we said that after looking at a chart of Venezuela's upcoming hyperinflation...

...  a hyperinflation in which the soaring stock market has failed to keep pace with the collapsing currency, thereby mocking all erroneous thought experiments that under hyperinflation being long the stock market is a sure hedge to currency destruction...

Submitted by Nick Cunningham via OilPrice.com,

The rumors of a coordinated production cut between OPEC and Russia continue to grow more serious. The latest comes from the Russian energy minister Alexander Novak, who insisted that Russia will hold talks with OPEC in February on a possible agreement to reduce output.