FT: Triple-digit Inflation Hits Lukashenko's Friend
- 9.11.2025, 15:36
The people of Venezuela don't mind the US stepping in and removing the ruler.
Venezuela is facing triple-digit inflation, increasing pressure on its authoritarian ruler Nicolas Maduro. All this comes as US Navy ships sink suspected drug trafficking ships off the country's coast, writes The Financial Times.
The FT reports that the local currency, the bolivar, has depreciated by more than 400% against the dollar over the past year. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicts inflation will reach 270% by the end of the year, the highest in the world. In 2024, 86 percent of Venezuelans were below the poverty line, the Venezuelan Financial Observatory calculated. Many residents of the oil-rich country are growing increasingly desperate - memories are still fresh of the six-figure hyperinflation of 2016-2019 that forced millions to flee abroad.
Minimum wage workers now earn about 60 cents a month: the bolivar exchange rate has fallen from 43 per dollar a year ago to 228 last week, according to the Central Bank.
A professor of economics at Venezuela's Central University Jose Guerra believes the grim economic outlook poses as much of a threat to Maduro as potential military action from the U.S. "The deeper the crisis, the louder people demand change."
The leftist government has tamed past crisis hyperinflation by loosening price controls and tacitly accepting the use of the U.S. dollar in everyday payments. In the run-up to elections last year, Maduro's central bank propped up the bolivar, spending billions of dollars from reserves. But after the vote, the results of which the opposition says were rigged, the central bank curtailed currency intervention and Maduro jailed protesters and opposition figures. He has since tightened measures against people reporting on the poor state of the economy, with independent economists and those publishing black market exchange rates arrested.
MWF predicts annual inflation will soar above 680 percent next year. The central bank has already stopped publishing inflation data. Dollars are in short supply on the streets, and Venezuelans rely on cryptocurrencies to buy goods and save.
Meanwhile, at least 69 people have been killed in at least 17 U.S. strikes on ships the United States believes are linked to Venezuelan drug cartels. Last month, Trump threatened Maduro with strikes on land targets, but this week said he "wouldn't be inclined" to say that was his plan. Meanwhile, the largest US aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R Ford, has moved out of the Mediterranean Sea to join a US flotilla off the coast of Venezuela.
Maduro believes the deployment of US forces in the region is aimed at removing him from office. "Everything they are doing against Venezuela is to justify war, regime change and to steal our great oil wealth," he said at a recent meeting with officials.
But a poll of Venezuelans living in and outside the country, released this week by local polling service Es Noticia, found that only 20 percent blame US sanctions for the country's economic woes - up from 33 percent in September.
"If the gringos want to intervene, let them intervene already," the FT reported one supermarket visitor as saying. - We tried to vote, we were jailed and now we can barely make ends meet - what else can we do?"