The poorest, as usual, have it the worst, though no one is spared. Hospitals and schools, posh neighborhoods and slums, they all go without water--at times for weeks on end--making this man-made drought arguably the most equalizing disaster the socialist government has ever managed to engineer.

... While he accused his opponents of waging economic warfare against the country, Maduro has been running Venezuela's economy into the ground with haphazard economic and political policies, including price controls and convoluted currency interventions inherited from his predecessor, Hugo Chávez. Hyperinflation has made even basic food and medicine completely unaffordable for millions. People are fleeing the country in droves.

Further fueling the protests: The government banned opposition leader Henrique Capriles from all political activity for 15 years on April 7.

The turmoil is set against an economic crisis in which unemployment is set to surpass 25%, and people have struggled for years with food and medical shortages and skyrocketing prices.

The economic crunch took another turn this week as the government seized a General Motors plant, prompting the auto giant to say it was halting operations in Venezuela.

...

Get this: the Fed is completely full of shit. It is terrified of the conditions it has set up and it has no idea what to do next. The "data" that it claims to be so dependent on is arrantly fake. The government's official unemployment number at Christmas 2016 was 4.6 percent. It's a compound lie....

In 2015 they didn't do anything until the very last Fed meeting of the year when they raised the Fed Funds rate 25 basis point (that's a measly one-quarter of a percent). They raised, they said, because they were "confident" about the economy. No, that's not why. They did it because they talked about it all year without doing anything and their credibility was on the line. They also promised four rate hikes altogether in 2016, which they then failed to carry out...

The Fed Funds rate is one thing. As it happens, the Fed does not directly control the interest rates on US treasury bonds, and they have been rising shockingly through the second half of 2016. The crucial ten-year treasury rate has gone up a hundred percent since the summer. Because bond values move inversely to bond rates, the price of ten-year treasuries has tanked, inducing trillions of dollars in losses to bond-holders around the world. The bond market is many times larger than the stock markets. Bonds have been in a bull market since the early 1980s and that bull rolled over in mid-2016...

A sharply rising interest rate on the ten-year Treasury bond will thunder through the system. A lot of other basic interest costs are keyed to the ten-year bond rate, especially home mortgages, apartment rentals (landlords hold mortgages), and car payments. When the ten year bond rate goes up, so do mortgage payments. When mortgage rates go up, house prices go down, because fewer people are in a position to buy a house at higher mortgage rates, and rents go up (more competition among people who can't buy a house). Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP), in force for ten years, has driven house prices back to stratospheric levels. They are now primed to fall, perhaps severely, leaving many homeowners "underwater," with houses worth way less on the market than the amount of mortgage left to pay off. The re-financing market is dead. Housing starts were already down by a stunning 19 percent in November. Automobile sales are rolling over. Manufacturing and retail sales numbers are down at year end. What's up: stocks, stocks, stocks.

Waving the now-worthless 100-bolivar bills, pockets of demonstrators blocked roads, demanded that stores accept the cash and cursed President Nicolas Maduro, witnesses said.

...

With new bills - originally due on Thursday - still nowhere to be seen, many Venezuelans were unable to fill their vehicles' fuel tanks to get to work, buy food or purchase Christmas gifts.

...

Maduro held up the new bills during a televised broadcast on Thursday night and said they would come into circulation soon. But that did not calm nervousness on the streets.

The arrival of the new notes "is a mystery to us too," said a source at the central bank, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters.

Looks like they were encouraged by India's esteemed de-cashification experiment...

How? He is president of one of Venezuela's most popular and insurgent websites, DolarToday.com, which provides a benchmark exchange rate used by his compatriots to buy and sell black-market dollars. That allows them to bypass some of the world's most rigid currency controls.

...

Mr. Díaz is a U.S.-trained retired colonel, and he indeed tried to overthrow Mr. Maduro's predecessor, Hugo Chávez, by participating in a short-lived coup in 2002. Mr. Díaz, who had been deputy security chief to the businessman who briefly took power in the ill-fated overthrow, said his conspiring days are over.

Now, he said, he is fighting for economic freedom and for Venezuelans' access to information in a country that makes financial and other data secret. Venezuela is undergoing a brutal recession that has made it hard for most of the country's 30 million people to find enough food and medicine.

"It's ironic that with DolarToday in Alabama, I do more damage to the government than I did as a military man in Venezuela," said Mr. Díaz, a short, soft-spoken man with a gray mane.

...

Meanwhile, buoyed by Thursday's self-styled "Takeover of Caracas" grand protest, the opposition are planning further street actions to demand a recall referendum against Maduro this year. But with the election board dragging out the process and Maduro vowing there will be no such vote in 2016, it is hard to see how the opposition can force it. Which likely means that any upcoming regime change will be violent, as Maduro - and the army to whom he has effectively all but handed over power - have left the millions of angry, starving Venezuelans no peaceful alternative.

The regime that fostered this nightmare, headed by Hugo Chávez until his death in 2013, is on the way out: It cannot survive the economic crisis and mass discontent it has created. The question is whether the change will come relatively peacefully or through an upheaval that could turn Venezuela into a failed state and destabilize much of the region around it.

Remarkably, most of the Western hemisphere is studiously ignoring this meltdown. The Obama administration and Washington's Latin America watchers are obsessed with the president's pet project, the opening to Cuba. As it happens, the Castros turned Venezuela into a satellite state, seeding its security forces and intelligence services with agents. Yet now that it is decreasingly able to supply discounted oil to its revolutionary mentor, Venezuela appears to have become an afterthought even in Havana.

...

Most of all, however, Venezuelans hope for U.S. leadership in pushing Maduro to accept an election. Said Vecchio: "The moment has arrived when you can no longer ignore this. Because what happens in Venezuela is going to affect the whole region.''

... in an honest two-way market, no one in their right mind would bet $7.5 billion on financial drek using high leverage and minimal hedges. And no 30-year old would be given leave to close his eyes and bet the ranch, as apparently Levin did, based on merely the "housing recovery" word clouds being emitted by the monetary politburo and its echo-boxes in the financial press.''