Book Talk: The Collapse of Venezuela
What does the collapse of the Venezuelan economy tell us about U.S. relations with Latin America?
The announcement of a $50 million bounty for the arrest of President Nicolas Maduro is the latest twist in the tangled relationship between the United States and Venezuela. A spiraling political and economic crisis in the South American country driven by ever -deepening polarization between its two dueling political forces has led to both sides pushing scorched-earth economic policies. U.S. sanctions only added fuel to the fire. All this led to a GDP crash of more than 70%. While Venezuela is an extreme case, there are broader lessons here for Latin America and the Caribbean about the risks of long-term reliance on commodity exports, dangers of winner-take-all systems, and how a neighboring great power should not behave.
To discuss all this and more, Karthik Sankaran, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute, will be speaking with Francisco Rodriguez, author of the recently published The Collapse of Venezuela: Scorched Earth Politics and Economic Decline, 2012-2020.
The conversation will take place on Tuesday, August 26th from 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM Eastern Time.
Program
Countries/Territories
Panelists
Francisco Rodríguez
Francisco Rodríguez is the Rice Family Professor of the Practice of International and Public Affairs at the University of Denver's Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs. A native of Venezuela, he is also the founder of Oil for Venezuela, a non-profit organization focused on finding solutions to Venezuela's humanitarian crisis. He received a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and an undergraduate degree in economics from Venezuela's Universidad Católica Andrés Bello.He has held prominent positions in the public and private sector and international organizations, including Head of the Economic and Financial Advisory of the Venezuelan National Assembly (2000-2004), Head of the Research Team of the United Nations' Human Development Report Office (2008-2011) and Chief Andean Economist of Bank of America (2011-2016). Rodríguez is the author of four books and more than sixty research articles. His research has appeared in the American Economic Journal, Journal of Economic Growth, Journal of Macroeconomics, Journal of Politics and World Development, among other peer-reviewed journals.
Karthik Sankaran
Karthik Sankaran is a senior research fellow in geoeconomics in the Global South program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He was originally trained as a Modern European Historian but instead pursued careers in journalism and then finance as a strategist and as a trader/portfolio manager. He was engaged primarily with foreign exchange and fixed income in emerging markets at a variety of institutions on the sell-side and the buy-side. In this capacity, he saw the ripples of the Asian financial crisis of 1997 into Russia and Latin America, and then the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, and the subsequent Eurozone crisis of 2011. He then joined Eurasia Group as Director, Global Strategy, where he worked with country and regional teams to chart feedback loops among political and geopolitical risks, macroeconomics, and market responses.