#IMF: Soaring #VENEZUELA, 40% + Unemployment Rate, Fuels Crisis

"Many businesses and shops remain closed in what once were the busiest commercial districts of the capital, Caracas." 

Venezuela Unemployment Nears That of War-Ruined Bosnia, IMF Says

By 

David Biller

 and 

Patricia Laya

Venezuela’s unemployment rate is soaring to levels unseen in the world since the Bosnian war came to an end more than two decades ago, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Joblessness will reach 44.3 percent in 2019 and will slam nearly half of Venezuela’s labor force in 2020, the IMF said in its World Economic Outlook published on Tuesday. Bosnia and Herzegovina’s joblessness was 50 percent in 1996, immediately after its 3 1/2-year domestic war, according to the multilateral’s database.

The Venezuelan depression is among the deepest economic catastrophes ever suffered by a nation outside of wartime. This year alone, the Andean nation’s output will shrink by a quarter -- the most worldwide since the 2014 start of the Libyan civil war, according to the IMF. The contraction has become so large that it’s generating “sizable drag” on growth not just in Latin America, but also in emerging markets as a whole.

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HYPERINFLATION - HOW IT WORKS

#Global Debt #Markets On Verge Of Imploding

Ballooning Global Debt Will Undo Poverty Improvements

Written by Jesse Colombo |

Bill Gates recently tweeted a chart (see below) that showed the percentage of the world population living in extreme poverty since 1820. Thankfully, there has been a tremendous improvement in the past two centuries – 94.4% of humans lived in extreme poverty in 1820 versus only 9.6% in 2015. Of course, this chart started a lively debate about the reasons for this improvement, whether the definition of extreme poverty is correct, and so on.

The point I want to add to this debate is that there is a very real risk that soaring global debt will cause another severe economic crisis (likely a full-blown depression), which will reverse a portion of the gains made in poverty reduction, cause geopolitical instability, unrest, wars, and other unpleasant side-effects. Global debt has surged by nearly $150 trillion since 2003 and $70 trillion since 2008. As bad as the 2008 global financial crisis was, the next crisis will hit the global economy even harder simply due to the fact that an additional $70+ trillion in debt has been added. That means that governments and central banks have far less firepower with which to stabilize their economies in the next crisis.

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