[cs702]

Obviously, but $240B is a lot of money for a country with only 9M households, so, around $27K/household. It's an "accomplishment" of sorts to blow up in smoke that much money per household, with nothing to show for it. How the heck did they do that?

[55555]

1. Dictator gets loans for his country 2. Dictator puts the money in his Swiss bank account 3. Government is overthrown 4. The populace has to pay off the debt

Perhaps him being in custody will lead to some of the money being found and returned.

[joenot443]

I don't think there's a Swiss bank account in the world with room for $240b.

There's no doubt Maduro enjoyed some taste of the froth, but this is a silly oversimplification.

[ErneX]

Corruption at every level of government. Everybody was getting a piece of it. Add to that mismanagement, stupid subsidies. Plus they had a huge oil windfall during the early Chavez years. All that money is gone, I wish it was just the money that was borrowed from abroad.

They also spent billions to influence the elections of the other countries of the region. Chavez was also giving away oil for free in exchange of political support abroad. He even gave free oil for the buses of London because the mayor at the time was in good relations or something.

[seanmcdirmid]

Isn’t that how private equity works?

[nwah1]

Look up the lifestyle of Hugo Chavez's daughter, or the family of Tareck El Aissami, or the Narconephews affair, or the Cartel of the Suns.

[ErneX]

They caused a 9 million people exodus on a country with about 30 million people. It’s difficult to find a similar case of mismanagement and corruption at the level it happened in Venezuela.

[tokai]

They have had an average yearly public budget deficit of %4.8 of GPD since 1990. My very shoddy and quick napkin math comes out as an overall deficit since '90 til now to be ~200 billion dollars. While there's definitely corruption, I think that there's also a place for their economy to be in such a bad state that its been a black hole for this debt.