Here I show a chart of the historical price of the USD in terms of bolivares. The source of the chart is Wikipedia.
In order to have an idea of this collapse I will mention how it is reflected in the paper currency, i.e. the bank notes. The 100 bolivar bank note was issued in January 2008 and it was the highest denomination bank note of the country at that time. Its value was approximately 18.70, using the exchange rate of the parallel market.
In December 2016, the new denomination bank notes were issued by the central bank. They were 500, 1000, 2000, 5000, 10000 and 20000 bolivares, even though they were introduced in the streets in January 2017. The value of the highest denomination note, i.e. 20000Bs, in December 2016 was 6.32USD and at the time of writing this note its value is 2,59USD.
As you can see the inflation and the speed of how the Venezuelan currency loses value, in other words the total collapse of the Venezuelan bolivar.
In this post I am not going to describe in detail the causes of this monetary collapse. However I would like to mention that this tragedy is happening just after having the greatest oil bonanza in Venezuelan history. It is extremely sad, after receiving almost one trillion of dollar in oil revenues, the government did not save resources of the surplus income. In the meantime, during the oil boom, the Venezuelan external debt was increase 7 fold.
I would like to point out that the Venezuelan economic collapse was not caused by the sudden crash in the oil prices. The country had already serious macro-economic problems when the oil prices, were in the neighborhood of 100USD, per barrel. The fall in oil prices was only a catalyst of the economical crisis of the country. No other oil producing country has a economical crisis of the magnitude that Venezuela is suffering. However the official version of the cause of this collapse is the fall in the oil prices.