It comes to something when readers of one of the most outright capitalist mediums in the world give lessons on reality to its reporters on Venezuela. Today we've been treated to yet another "Oh Noes! We're all gonna die....soon.....probably" note on Venezuelan economics, penned by Benedict Mander of the FT. It's the samo samo as we've seen since lawd know when and filled with the clichés we're all used to:
- Negative headline with use of question mark? Check
- Hugo Chávez named in the first line to help with those search engine optimizations? Check
- PDVSA's massive debt? Check
- The "dollar crunch" that tends to affect the rich middle class more than the majority of Venezuelans? Check
- Use of the phrase "dubious statistics"? Check.
So run along and read it, too, as a better template for YouTooCanBeAnExpertOnVenezuelanEconomy! will be hard to find. However, after reading through the thing your author was pleased to see that the only two commenters on Mander's note (so far Friday morning EST) have taken him to task on this trite piece of hackery. Here they are for your reading pleasure.
| October 14 11:29pm | If you don´t know 'how bad' why you titled the opinion "Just how bad is Venezuela’s dollar crunch"?? Are you expecting others respond to you?. I believe you write this article only for dark-politics purpose. Is your style anyway, i.e. is the way you obtain money
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| October 15 6:47am | You guys must be running out of things to write about. I've seen this same editorial written with different incidentals over the past 12 years of Venezuelan history.
Indeed. We're tired of the samo samo BS about Venezuela's economy, reporting herd. Really, the good story to write here is just how Venezuela has kept it's heterodox economic model intact for over a dozen years, with the post-PDVSA strike period particularly interesting. The story I'd like to read would be penned by some normally boring hack who's covered Venezuela for multiple years and begins, "For all this time my predictions on Venezuela's collapse have been wrong. Let's examine why that has been the case.." but there's about as much chance of that as there is of reading something resembling the truth about LatAm in The Economist.