Quote from southamerica:
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Front Page article on âThe Financial Timesâ on February 6, 2006
âChávez ratchets up tensions with U.S.â
By Richard Lapper,Latin America Editor
The Financial Times - UK
Published: February 6 2006
Both moves followed fierce criticism of Mr Chávez by US officials. On Thursday John Negroponte, director of national intelligence, accused him of meddling in the affairs of his neighbours, while Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, casually compared the Venezuelan president to Adolf Hitler. This drew a response from Mr Chávez on Saturday that "Hitler could be a nursery baby next to George W. Bush''.
Ya make it sound like they got themselves another Fidel Castro.Quote from southamerica:
SouthAmerica: Chavez has been helping a lot the poor population of Venezuela (at least 80 percent of the population) â he is giving them education, subsidized food, and healthcare. The people in Venezuela love him.

Quote from gortaur:
What is truly fightening is your logic not SA's post. You as well as many others seem to have a very perverted view on the economic cycle. It goes like this savings-> investments-> production->consumption.As Hayeks puts it as long as an economy consumes more than it produces real economic activity would decline. All else is keneysian socialist delusion. A big delusion among americans today seems to be the idea that Chinese need the US consumer and that if the $ loses most of ots value China would suffer more than America.
What you fail to see is that the world economy functions like a big auction. For instance if a brand new flat screen TV costs 1000$ today the average Chinese cannot afford because his salary is about 200$ per month unlike the average Joe in the US who has a salary of 2000$.If the $ crashes from 1$:8.2 Yuans to 1:1 suddenly the chinese worker is making 1600$ while the average US worker is still making 2000$. So the Chinese would now be able to afford the goods he produces. Same goes for the chinese government they might get screwed on their USD reserves but their yuan position, which is BTW much larger, would more than compensate for the loss since the yuan would buy much more goods and assets. What the Chinese do now is equivalent to dumping their production in the sea while People's Bank of China distributes them Yuan. Countries as well as individuals dont trade for the sake of accumulating paper money they trade for goods and services. The only reason this is still happening is inertia. The world still thinks of America as the highly productive,competitive economy of the 50s-60s-70s wich was the world's greatest manufacturer and low cost exporter. These days unfortunately for the US are long gone what we have left is a service economy with wedding planners and lawyers. It would take some time for the world to catch up with that fact but eventually it will happen. And with the huge twin deficits in excess 1.5 trilion $ one can assume that it will happen sooner rather than later. The US of today reminds of the USSR in the 80s.
Hyperinflation is an amazing economic phenomena. I made a lot of money on the russian default and subsequent hyperinflation as well as on the argetnian crisis.