Corrupt Banks Can Bakrupt Nations: Parallels US 2008 to Venezuela 1994

[World Traveller]

The causes and parallels to what we see in U.S. today are startling.

Venezuela's banking crisis precipitated a major economic crisis in the "real economy". Causes in Venezuela were insider dealing, cronyism, corruption, de-regulation, lack of government oversight and enforcements of the banking laws. So that by 1994, the major Venezuelan banks were essentially Ponzi schemes, loaded with bad debts and being looted by insiders.

Venezuela government had to spend huge sums to bail out the banks. As they were being bailed out, insiders/bankers sent their "winnings" overseas. Otherwise known as capital flight...and note that Dr. Michael Hudson is warning that because U.S. gov't oversight of our banking bail out is so weak, there's a real chance that some of the U.S. bail-out money will be sent overseas by U.S. banks/insiders being made whole.

In the mid-1990's, as a result of bad banking and low oil prices, the Venezuelan economy was in a state of collapse. Once a place with a vibrant middle class, by 1997, the middle class had all but disappeared - 90% of the population were living below poverty level.

This then paved the way for Hugo Chavez's first election to the presidency, with over 60% of the vote. He was a new party, 3rd party candidate...the traditional 2 parties, both controlled by the tiny elite of super-rich, had lost all credibility.

Excerpts and links to 1994 Times article are below.

"
By JAMES BROOKE,
Published: May 16, 1994

In Latin America's worst banking crisis of the free-market 1990's, a string of failures since January has left half of Venezuela's banking industry in the hands of the Government.

Venezuelan taxpayers face a $6.1 billion bailout bill, as the Government props up nine banks, including Banco Latino, the nation's second largest. More banks may fail as inspectors unravel a five-year-long banking spree generated by deregulated interest rates and minimal Government supervision.

"Eighty to 90 percent of the banking system is compromised in this catastrophe," said Oscar Garcia Mendoza, president of one of the strongest banks here, Banco Venezolano de Credito.

The costly bailout is contributing to political instability. And while fugitive bank directors enjoy comfortable overseas exile, Venezuelans are paying for the bank failures with high inflation, reduced government services and shrinking economic activity.

Venezuela's $6.1 billion bailout represents 11 percent of Venezuela's gross national product and 75 percent of the Government's 1994 national budget...

"I maintain that the presidents of many banks in Venezuela have signed many more balances with false figures than I ever have," Gustavo Gomez Lopez, Banco Latino's president until three weeks before the fall, wrote in March in a statement defending himself against charges of fraud, criminal conspiracy and undue appropriation........."

Above quote from president of the bank at epicenter of storm... "I was just doing what everyone else was doing." Does that sound familiar????

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...=&pagewanted=3

[Peace Patriot]

1. Interesting parallel. I've been making the point lately that this financial 9/11

that the Bushwhacks have pulled off here, hit South America ten years ago, and resulted in...democracy and rebellion. The South Americans have been facing and addressing neolib/neocon-ism longer than we have, and are better insulated because of it. Well, they are better insulated because one of the measures they have taken was to strengthen their democratic institutions--such as transparent vote counting--which are much stronger than our own. Thus, they have elected FDR's all over the continent--Chavez in Venezuela, Correa in Ecuador, Morales in Bolivia, Vasquez in Uruguay, Nestor and then Cristina Kirchner in Argentina, Lula da Silva in Brazil, and, less of an FDR but still a leftist, Batchelet in Chile, and, more recently, Fernando Lugo in Paraguay, and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. South American elections have been swept by leftists--due to transparent vote counting--but not just leftists, rather, leftists on a specific mission--and allied with each other on that mission--to NEVER LET THAT HAPPEN TO SOUTH AMERICA AGAIN.

That's what FDR determined as well--never to let that happen to the U.S. again--unregulated speculation and insider profit-taking, to the point of meltdown, with ordinary people and small businesses absolutely without protection.

Argentina literally went into meltdown in the mid-90s--they were a basketcase, ruined by World Bank/IMF loan sharks (the rich take the money, rip it off, and leave the poor to pay the debt) and other neoliberal/"free trade" policies. Venezuela came to the rescue, with easy term loans, to get Argentina out of debt. Argentina immediately began to recover, and is now a healthy trading partner for Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia and others. This was the seed of the Bank of the South--one of Chavez's best ideas: regionally controlled financing of development, with social justice goals. And it exemplifies what has happened since the great neoliberal/"free trade" crash that hit many South American countries. They pulled together. They have now formed UNASUR--the South American "Common Market" (sans the U.S.).

The Chavez government, in the avantgarde of this movement (first elected way back in 1998), has taken strong measures to protect Venezuela from Bushwhack "shock and awe," including building up $40 billion in cash reserves, renegotiating the oil contracts to give Venezuela a 60/40 split of the profits (as opposed to previous rightwing deals that split the profits 10/90 in favor of the multinantionals), nationalizing critical industries (steel, cement), and providing bootstrapping help to the poor and to small business (lots of money infused into schools, adult retraining, health care, food supplements for the extremely poor, small business loans and grants, low cost housing and other infrastructure), and, recently, buying the Bank of Venezuela (originally nationalized, prior to Chavez, then privatized, then recently put on the market).

The Chavez government has also been far-thinking in its treatment of its neighbors--Argentina being a prime example. But it is also helping Bolivia, Paraguay, Nicaragua and many others--with easy term loans, cheap oil and bartering deals (for instance, getting Argentinian beef to help with its food supply problem, or Cuban doctors for its medical clinics, in trade for cheap oil). (Cuba has one of the best health care systems in the western hemisphere, and, indeed, in the world.)

A healthy economy is a bottom-up economy, not top down. Wealth trickles up, from the productivity, loyalty and creativity of the workforce. It never trickles down--except for creation of a well-off, urban, minority elite to service the rich and advocate against the interests of the poor and the country as a whole. That is exactly what happened in Venezuela. Previous rightwing governments allowed a rich and very selfish oil elite to develop, in the cities--a well-off, pampered group, with high wages, addicted to imported goods, and utterly neglectful of all of the elements of a decent society: schools, medical care, infrastructure (street lighting, flood control, low cost housing), local manufacturing, food self-sufficiency (land reform). The rich oil elite in Caracas, with their Gucci bags and their Jaguars, not only utterly neglected their countrymen, they opened the country to the devastation of the mid-1990s neoliberal rapine advocated by Washington DC.

Local manufacturing is a key point. The rich oil elite in Caracas--dependent on Venezuela's main resource for its wealth--were IMPORTING machine parts for the oil industry! Nothing was made in Venezuela any more--an utterly crazy, short-term, self-centered policy that included many products that could have been providing jobs for the less fortunate--and a vibrant, diversified economy. They also utterly neglected land reform, and made Venezuela almost wholly dependent on imported food--when Venezuela, like many South American countries, has a large population of campesinos, skilled organic, small scale food growers, who were systematically kicked off their small plots of farm land, often in favor of big, absentee landowners, who let the land lie fallow, while Venezuela lost food self-sufficiency.

These were the sorts of ills at the bottom, and utter irresponsibility at the top, that we are now seeing the impacts of here in the U.S., and that Chavez and most other South American leaders were elected to address, and have been addressing, for the last decade. They are going to land on their feet, is my guess, while we flounder around in--and possibly sink under--a $10 trillion deficit, after more than two decades of incredibly irresponsible, self-centered, greedy, anti-democratic--and, with the Bush Junta, insane--policy among the rich and in the halls of government.

Transparent elections! That has been the key to everything in South America. And guess what we don't have here any more?