Translation mine; linkage added.Well, let’s see if Chavecito doesn’t improvise something nifty on the fly. He’s very good at that; the ALBA, among other things, was an improvisation of his, which he came out with at the spur of the moment during a speech about the need to kill the ALCA (the Spanish acronym of the FTAA, or Free Trade Area of the Americas) during the 2005 summit at Mar del Plata, Argentina. ALCA is now officially DOA, so we know he wasn’t talking out his ass on that one. (Sorry, Otto, but you’re a little off base when you say the man doesn’t do finance well. He does; he just doesn’t do it the capitalist way. He certainly knew how to kill a bad done deal dead!)Swami ‘Bina predicts that Chavecito will probably turn the recuperated banks into credit unions once the depositors get their looted money back. Meaning, citizens will be actual shareholders and managers of their own cash, instead of justPresident Hugo Chávez called upon bank customers yesterday to maintain calm and not give in to rumors which, according to him, are meant to generate a run on the banks with the end purpose of “toppling Chávez”. “Pay no attention to those attacks, because what they’re trying to do is create alarm […] It all came out on the Internet, by phone, and so on. They’re looking for what’s known as a run on the banks, and they think they’ll topple Chávez with that. I repeat, the only thing that’s going to fall here is the private banking system, not Chávez. Don’t be fooled, it will backfire on them,” said the president during the graduation ceremony for the eighth cohort of Mission Ribas, broadcast from the Teresa Carreño theatre.Chávez reminded listeners that the government is acting “against a group of banks whose owners could not show where they had gotten all that money. Right up to now they couldn’t do it, and that’s their job,” he said, referring to the liquidated Banco Canarias and BanPro, and the also bailed-out Bolívar and Confederado banks.Chávez warned that “we have another banking chain on our radar […] and you may be sure that if I’m obliged to intervene in all the private banks of Venezuela, I’ll do it. Let there be no doubt.”Chávez called on private bankers to take care and comply with the law. “I’m keeping an eye on them, because private banking has degenerated into a chain of mechanisms and instead of doing their jobs, the banks are specializing in financial speculation.”The president decreed an end to the hegemony of private banks, and announced the creation of a “real public financial system”, although he did not give more details.
