I am amongst those who believe that one of the most important reforms we can bequeath to future generations of Venezuelans would be that of forcing the country to begin a gradual but real amortization of its external public debt. When the latter reaches zero, we should then constitutionally prohibit new indebtedness.
I consider this perfectly justifiable due to a) the dreadful experience we have had in the past with our public debt; b) the fact that even the slightest improvement in the country’s economic climate incites the international financial sector to press more loans into our hands; and c) the fact that it must be very difficult for our leaders to resist the temptation of reaching out for those new resources.
The arguments are simple and unsophisticated. As such, they are of little help in the battle against the thesis, universally accepted, that foreign debt is absolutely necessary in order to maximize the development of a nation. This thesis is even considered applicable in countries like Venezuela, which receive resources from sources other than debt that amply surpass its capacity to digest them efficiently.
I obviously believe in access by the private sector to the international capital markets. If there were no public external debt, the market conditions in Venezuela would be very different from those we have today. Today’s conditions could be summarized as being 3% over a country risk factor of 20%. It is difficult to take on debt in Bolívares at 70% interest even when there is the “hope” that inflation or devaluation will erode the real cost of the debt. It is virtually impossible to contemplate debt in Dollars at 23% interest when taking into account that inflation in the United States is somewhere around 2% per annum and the world threatens to hit us with recession.
Today, every politician agrees with the thesis that we should shrink the size of the public sector and reduce the number of public employees. The majority of them are in favor of the “bit-by-bit” method, arguing that these layoffs should be implemented only when the private sector creates the offsetting job opportunities. The classic case of the chicken or the egg!
The private sector will only be able to be the motor of development when the mortgage of the external private debt that indirectly taxes its activities is removed. We cannot expect the help of banks and the international financial entities with this task. For decades, we have heard their calls for the reduction of the public sector while, with the same breath, they request the Republic’s guarantees in order to lend resources to the private sector.
One of the main worries the common Venezuelan citizen harbors is that solutions to the mismanagement of our current public debt, such as the partial sale of PDVSA or Citgo, will only contribute to the continuation of the orgy of bad administration of the State. I am sure that if we managed to implement a credible constitutional prohibition that will assure the population that our national debt crisis will not be repeated, it would be possible to reach a consensus.
The key word, of course, is “credible”. If we have learned anything from our past experience with modern democracies, it is that they have an immense capacity of altering their course in order to satisfy short term aims. Today we may applaud the prohibition mentioned above. Tomorrow they would probably look for our applause to lift the same prohibition.
A proposal such as this one, evidently has many natural enemies. On top of our leaders that like to win votes by using easy money, we also find the bankers that wish to place their resources, easily, with high yields and with “safety”.
When we say “safety” we mean that in our unreal world, a banker that lends funds to a private sector company that then goes broke due to the government’s erroneous policies puts his job at risk while the banker that only lends to the government, thereby abetting those very same policies, normally does so without risking his personal hide.
There are other enemies, not necessarily natural ones. These maintain that is in unpatriotic to limit the State’s attributions. These enemies can be recognized by the ease with which they maintain in the same breath that the actual debt is bad but that future debt is good. We remind these people that to govern while recognizing human failings and thereby avoiding further damage cannot possibly be unpatriotic.
To continue to believe egoistically that the next government, or the one after that, will not repeat the same errors is surely treason. If there is one nation in the world that can attest to this fact, it is Venezuela. The immense resources from the country’s oil production has not contributed much to the country. Certainly, the debt it has contracted has not contributed at all.
