Recadivi, it's Official: Dual Exchange Rate at Bs. 2.60 and Bs.4.30 per dollar
Chávez is calling the Bs.4.30 (CUATRO TRENTA, COMPAÑERO!) exchange rate the "dolar petrolero": the government is going to double the number of bolivars it gets for every oil dollar exported.
He’s also vowing to "intervene" directly on the permuta market as well – once again announcing something they’ve been doing for years as though it were news.
Folks, when you have two different prices for a single good – no longer just implicitly, but now explicitly as well – the result is corruption: here, in Mars and everywhere in between. The fake receipts, the Cadivi kickbacks, the now fully-inside-the-system arbitrage: there is no way around it.
UPDATE: Another $7 billion atraco against the Central Bank’s foreign reserves. In Argentina, this kind of thing causes an institutional crisis that shakes the republic to its core. In Venezuela, it won’t even make the lede paragraph of tomorrow’s newspaper stories on this announcement.
UPDATE II – CONTEST: First person to find today’s announcement described using the word "devaluación" in any official media outlet wins a lollypop. This, my friends, is Orwellianismo de pacotilla…
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