What is a dollar worth? Depends on who you know
Venezuela today has four different prices for the dollar – three of them official, one of them not. For basic imports (chavista code for “available only to Godgiven and...
Economy
An announcement about nothing
The Expectation-Disappointment cycle around Venezuela exchange-mechanism announcements is so well established by now, we barely get our hopes up any more. Today was no different. There was little...
Día Día speaks
(Día Día Practimercados is a small grocery store chain that caters to Venezuelans living in the country’s slums. Last week, they were taken over by the government. The...
The Guy Who Refinanced His House to Buy PDVSA 2037 Bonds
The horror…the horror…the HAT! Ross was so taken with the returns he enjoyed in 2011 that he had three green baseball caps custom-made with P-D-V-$-A on the front...
Earth to Jaua: we're broke
It’s funny how Minister Elías Jaua hasn’t fully realized how broke we are. Last week, the Minister, along with Infrastructure Minister Haiman El-Troudi, gave a bloated press conference...
It's the economic war, stupid!
Ever since scarcity began, Venezuelans were presented with a new phenomenon: “economic war.” Hazily defined and poorly communicated, economic war basically says that someone – the opposition, private industry,...
The Sound of 1.1 Trillion Pennies Dropping
People are starting to put 2 and 2 together. This Reuters report finds that 40 major U.S. companies have big-time exposure to the Venezuelan shitshow, in the form of...
Nicolás Maduro cracks down on Farmatodo
Farmatodo is one of the largest pharmacy chains in Venezuela. To our foreign friends, the Venezuelan equivalent to a Walgreens or a CVS. A productive family business that has...
The tale of the lonely airport
Back in March 2014, Vice-President Jorge Arreaza formally re-opened the Bartolome Salom Airport in Puerto Cabello, after spending ten years closed. With almost a year or remodelling works...
UN confirms poverty on the rise in Venezuela
The UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America is finally catching on to what we wrote about months ago: poverty is on a quick ascendancy in Venezuela. The worst part of...
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