Chart of the week: the Venezuelan refugee exodus

published 31 August 2018

The Venezuelan refugee crisis is becoming one of the world's biggest, comparable with the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar and the migration of Syrians fleeing war, according to the Financial Times. Inflation has spiralled as high as 80,000%, which has rendered cash useless and food and medicine scarce.

According to the UN, 2.3 million people have left in recent years 7% of the population. Many have fled to neighbouring Colombia and found their way to Ecuador, Peru and Chile. At the same time, nearly 19,000 Venezuelans requested asylum in the EU in the 12 months to July, which is unprecedented. They mostly asked for asylum in Spain for linguistic and cultural reasons.

Viewpoint

"Throughout this decade-long bull market, most commentators kept repeating [that] the fundamental problems of the financial crisis remained unresolved and equities were dangerously overvalued. [This shows that to] win respect as an economist, one should always predict disaster. Prophets of doom are always admired for [their] sagacity regardless of whether [they're] right or wrong, [but] optimistic economists are usually dismissed as superficial, charlatan Panglossians, even when they are right. Everyone can name the famous economists who "predicted" the 2008 global financial crisis, even though [they] had spent the previous five, ten, or 20 years predicting crises that never happened. But how many economists have gained renown by predicting the post-crisis economic recovery and the bull market in equities that began in March 2009?"