Maduro’s madness
Imagine if Theresa May suddenly announced that her government was going to devalue the pound by 96 per cent; increase the minimum wage by 6,000 per cent; pay the wage increases for millions of businesses for three months; tie the pound to a mythical cryptocurrency; prepared for petrol rationing; and impose a 0.7 per cent tax on big financial transactions. It would be seen either as an act of lunacy, of a collapsing country — or both. For the long-suffering people of Venezuela, it’s just the latest stage of their country’s grand socialist experiment. President Nicolás Maduro has just issued a new currency, called ‘sovereign bolivars’. The original idea was