Business leaders accused Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Sunday of attempting to strangle businesses that rely on imports by making them pay more for foreign-made products.
They said Chavez is irresponsibly allowing the black-market rate for US dollars to spiral upward, which increases costs for close to half of the country’s importers.
“The government doesn’t consider it a priority,” said Alfonzo Rivas, a businessman and president of the non-governmental group Cedice, which promotes individual and economic freedoms.
Chavez set a two-tiered exchange rate in January, pegging the bolivar at 2.60 to the US dollar for priority goods such as food and 4.30 per US dollar for imports of products the government deems nonessential.
The government has not distributed enough US dollars at the official rate to satisfy demand, however, forcing close to half of Venezuela’s importers to buy much more expensive greenbacks on the black market.
The black-market rate for the US dollar reached 8 bolivars last week — almost double the official rate for nonessential imports and triple the rate for essential imports.
For many businesses, “all the products that cannot be imported at the official rate must be obtained on the parallel market and that’s going to create more inflation,” Rivas said.
In a speech on Saturday, Chavez blamed wealthy business owners for soaring prices, suggesting they are conspiring to undermine his government’s anti-inflationary measures, such as price controls on hundreds of basic products ahead of congressional elections in September.
“There’s a conspiracy. The bourgeoisie are very much involved in managing the economy,” Chavez said. “I warn the bourgeoisie — we are not going to allow ourselves to be pushed around.”
Business leaders deny plotting against Chavez, countering that he seems determined to gradually replace private businesses and industries with state-run enterprises.
“The government sees the business community as an enemy,” said Rivas, whose own business imports raw materials to produce soups, microwave popcorn, cereal and other goods.
Victor Maldonado, who leads the Caracas Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Services, told Union Radio that Chavez’s socialist economic policies — not business owners — are responsible for Venezuela’s double-digit inflation. He urged the president to moderate his agenda and seek new advisers.
“Any governing official with good judgment should rethink his ideological principles, economic policies and group of collaborators,” Maldonado said.
Last week, the Central Bank and National Statistics Institute reported a 5.2 percent increase in consumer prices last month, driving the annual inflation rate to 30.4 percent.
Jose Guerra, a former Central Bank official who teaches economics at the Central University of Venezuela, said that “the inflation problem is getting out of the government’s hands.”
Chavez implemented the two-tiered exchange rate to discourage imports of nonessential goods, while promoting domestic production of items such as food. Critics argue the initiative has failed.
Opposition leader Julio Borges said inflation is worsening because the government has not curbed the country’s dependence on imports.
The nation’s fastest supercomputer, Nano 4 (晶創26), is scheduled to be launched in the third quarter, and would be used to train large language models in finance and national defense sectors, the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) said. The supercomputer, which would operate at about 86.05 petaflops, is being tested at a new cloud computing center in the Southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan. The exterior of the server cabinet features chip circuitry patterns overlaid with a map of Taiwan, highlighting the nation’s central position in the semiconductor industry. The center also houses Taiwania 2, Taiwania 3, Forerunner 1 and
FIRST TRIAL: Ko’s lawyers sought reduced bail and other concessions, as did other defendants, but the bail judge denied their requests, citing the severity of the sentences Former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) was yesterday sentenced to 17 years in prison and had his civil rights suspended for six years over corruption, embezzlement and other charges. Taipei prosecutors in December last year asked the Taipei District Court for a combined 28-year, six-month sentence for the four cases against Ko, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The cases were linked to the Core Pacific City (京華城購物中心) redevelopment project and the mismanagement of political donations. Other defendants convicted on separate charges included Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Angela Ying (應曉薇), who was handed a 15-year, six-month sentence; Core Pacific
J-6 REMODEL: The converted drones are part of Beijing’s expanding mix of airpower weapons, including bombers with stand-off missiles and UAV swarms, the report said China has stationed obsolete supersonic fighters converted to attack drones at six air bases close to the Taiwan Strait, a report published this month by the Arlington, Virginia-based Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies said. Satellite imagery of the airfields from the institute’s “China Airpower Tracker” shows what appear to be lines of stubby, swept-winged aircraft matching the shape of J-6 fighters that first flew with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force in the 1960s. Since their conversion to drones, the aircraft have been identified at five bases in China’s Fujian Province and one in Guangdong Province, the report said. J.
China used fake LinkedIn profiles to harvest sensitive data from NATO and EU institutions by soliciting information from staff, a European security source said on Friday. The operation, allegedly orchestrated by the Chinese Ministry of State Security, targeted dozens of employees at the military alliance or EU organizations through fictitious accounts, the source said, confirming reports in French and Belgian media. Posing as recruiters on the online professional networking platform, Chinese spies would initially request paid reports before later soliciting non-public or even classified information. One particularly active fake profile used the name “Kevin Zhang,” claiming to be the head
RSS