Half the Venezuelan economy has disappeared

[palou]

Let's clarify a couple things;

The control of the economy by the Venezuelan government was both excessive, and most of all, extremely poorly implemented, by people who clearly knew (or cared) very little about running a country. This is not helped by highly frequent corruption.

In essence, the whole thing should have collapsed long ago. However, they struck oil. For some time, thanks to the OPEC cartel, this served as a source of income sufficiently large and easy to obtain that even with all the leaks in the system, the government managed to keep the country afloat.

This source of easy revenue evaporated, so the Venezuelan industrial output returns to its natural value - fuck all. 

 

This was fairly predictable, as a whole.