alt Hacker NewsObviously, 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?
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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.
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.
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.
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.