President Nicolas Maduro will govern by decree
There are people out there -- serious people -- who think the Fed is responsible for what's happened to global markets in the first two weeks of the year.
This should help them sort it out: Venezuela has declared a state of emergency after the latest data showed the economy contracted 4.5% in the first 9 months of 2015. It surely has gotten worse since then with oil prices continuing to fall. Meanwhile, inflation is running somewhere around 140%.
No doubt this is a bit of a power-grab after his centre-right opponents took control of the legislature in elections but it's also symptomatic of what's really roiling the global economy.
Commodities are collapsing and they're taking a big part of the global economy down with them. It's not just Venezuela, all the big commodity producers are suffering throughout Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. Plus Canada, the Antipodeans and Indonesia. On top of that, a sea of over-leveraged commodity companies are about to get obliterated.
