www.billnelson.com

I'm not sure, Alec, whether you mean "Hey man, that's unreal!", or whether to take you literally, i.e. you can't believe that 10,000% inflation could exist.

In case it's the latter, have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation . Gives you lots of examples of it. The two that I am most familiar with are Germany in the 1920s and Zimbabwe in the 2000s.

They reckon that inflation in Venezuela was over 33,000% in July last year.

Yes, Zimbabwe .... I became obsessed with Zim for a brief period because of many things not least of which were Grace Mugabe but also Robert's Hitler 'tache .

With Zim and with Venezuela, the pundits over here [and probably over there, too] love to sometimes throw out "Weimar Republic" ...

In terms of [un]real/Kabuki, I can't really imagine Trump and Putin at loggerheads about anything, including Venezuela, although I saw somewhere that Putin dropped dollar and bought up a large portion of the yuan . Couldn't bear to look .

I think I wrote a few days ago that I am convinced that I will shortly awake, to find that the past two and a half years have been naught but a dream.

You're in my dream too

"If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream."

Had a holiday in Zimbabwe in 2001. There was a total solar eclipse - mindblowing! Lovely country, lovely people, and it was devastating to see the damage that had already been done by Mugabe. And this was before the worst of the trouble. Only time I've come back from a holiday thinking about giving up my comfortable job in IT and seeing what I could do to help. (I didn't.)

BTW, Mugabe was usually driven around in a motorcade with sirens blaring - which the locals referred to as "Bob and the Wailers"

.

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Historians will regard this period of time as 'The Grifter Era'.

An IT Nelsonion : I say good .

I'll write to you from now on when I reach a tech conundrum .



Thumbs up .

I can’t quote the inflation figure off the top of my head but I’ve read way over 10,000%. It’s not a matter of looking at it as Trump backing one and Puttin the other. The fact of the matter is Maduro presides over a government held in place thanks to inflating salaries of the military, arming bands of thugs to name some. We had those in the Noriega days. They were called “Dignity Battalions”. All designed to keep the common man under his fat thumb. The country with the largest oil reserves of the planet can’t even feed itself. Panama and Colombia are
overrun by refugees fleeing not only totalitarianism, but quite simply “starvation” or the inability to buy food, not to mention lack of medicine, toilet paper etc etc etc.

Trump is a total fool and his backing Gaudio as fast as he did may be a
political mistake considering that god knows what will happen next in that
country. In MHO the Venezuelan situation, a long time ago, went beyond
the faze of …don’t-meddle-in-Venezuelans- internal-affairs. Presently the
only hope that something might change is if the whole damn world openly
condemns those thugs.

By the way…this is not a rant…just saying what I think makes sense. The
situation over there reminds me so much of Panama in the 1980’s. The
big difference is that the rulers of Panama had zero ideology. They were
just in it for the business. They had the guns though.