After years of reporting nothing about the state of its collapsed socialist economy, Venezuela surprised everyone by reporting the "ugly, ugly truth," as CNN puts it in its headline: Venezuela's economy is in shambles and the country has plunged into political chaos. The dysfunction is so great that basic economic data has been hard to come by. On Tuesday, for the first time in three years, the Central Bank of Venezuela published statistics on the country's battered economy. The bank's records show that in the third quarter of 2018, gross domestic product contracted a shocking 22.5% over the prior year. Bank records showed that the country's GDP has been in decline since the start of 2014 — contracting 52% between the third quarter of 2013 and the third quarter of 2018. That means the size of Venezuela's economy was reduced by half in a span of five years. Price inflation is out of control in Venezuela. The...(Read Full Post)