[ad_1]
Amidst the financial and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, hyperinflation is expected to reach epic proportions: one million percent by the end of 2018, announced Monday the International Monetary Fund.
The latest IMF forecast of Venezuelan inflation for this year 2018, announced in April, was 13,000%. At the time, the director of the Department of the Western Hemisphere, Alejandro Werner, had already described the Venezuelan crisis as one of the most important in the history of modern economics .
The IMF estimates that the Nicolás Maduro government will continue to encourage large fiscal deficits financed "entirely" by an expansion of the monetary base, which will continue to fuel the acceleration of inflation, said Werner.
Fall of the GDP . The Fund also corrects upward expectations of a drop in Venezuelan gross domestic product for this year. The 15% in which the figure in April now runs to a collapse of 18%, the third consecutive two-digit, "driven by a significant drop in oil production and widespread distortions at the micro level, in addition to large macroeconomic imbalances." The cumulative decrease of the last five years thus amounts to 48%.
The South American nation earns 96% of its revenue from oil sales, but under the government of President Nicolás Maduro, the lack of foreign exchange has caused economic paralysis that has left the country with a serious shortage of food and drugs.
Meanwhile, OPEC data show that Venezuelan oil production has dropped to a new 30-year low of 1.5 million barrels per hour. June, despite the fact that the country has the largest oil reserves in the world.
The South American nation earns 96% of its revenue from oil sales, but under the government of President Nicolás Maduro the lack of foreign exchange has caused an economic paralysis that has left the country with a severe shortage of food and of drugs.
Growth in Latin America and the Caribbean . The collapse of Venezuela slows growth in Latin America and the Caribbean to 1.6 percent this year, four tenths less than the May forecast. If Venezuela is excluded, the region "continues to recover" in a context of a recovery in consumption, with growth of 2.3% this year and 2.8% in 2019.
Argentina is expected to end to sign a loan agreement with the IMF, seeing slow economic growth at 0.4 percent this year, instead of the two percent forecast in May.
[ad_2]
Source link
