Trying to predict what will happen in South America’s wildest emerging markets in 2015 has the degree of difficulty of trying to compute pi to the 100th digit in your head.
With Venezuela, in particular, the range of options of what could happen next year is almost as infinite – ranging from more of the same and muddling through, to default, violence, coup, civil war and international brigades. On the economic front, whether Venezuela survives 2015 will depend almost purely on the price of oil, however.
Venezuela is facing a set of serious economic problems that thus far the country’s leadership under former Cuba-trained bus driver Nicolas Maduro seems unable, unwilling and woefully unprepared to deal with. Inflation – officially clocked by the government this summer at over 64 per cent – is in reality running at over 120 per cent. Rather than give evidence of how bad the economy is, the Government simply stopped publishing pesky economic statistics. The government has not even bothered to publish GDP figures since 2013.