Content adapted from this Zerohedge.com article : Source
When things are bad, most countries do not want the world to know. Few leaders are willing to publish bad news although few can avoid it.
Venzuela is one country that can. Since things are so bad there, the government refuses to publish basic statistics.
This led Bloomgberg to create their own guage to measure inflation.
Bloomberg explains that, as the name would suggest, it tracks just one item: a cup of coffee served piping hot at a bakery in eastern Caracas. Its price has jumped to 75,000 bolivars from 1,800 bolivars over the past 12 months, an increase of 4,067%.
Maduro is turning to what most politicians do in times like these; he is printing money. He believes that all the problems stem from the Unites States engaging in economic warfare.
Bremmer Rodrigues, who runs a bakery on the outskirts of Caracas, said his family are at a loss over what to do with their bags of bills. “It’s a mountain of cash, every day more and more.”
The shrinking value of the currency has meant that withdrawing the equivalent of $5 from an ATM produces brickloads of bills. Some ATMs now need to be refilled every few hours, because the machines can only hold so much cash. This means there are often a limited number of functioning ATMs in Caracas, and long queues to withdraw money.
The value of the currency is devalued so much that people do not bother to count the bolivar but weigh it.
One U.S. dollar is now going for 20,000 bolivar on the open market.
Shoppers need to fill bags with money to even buy groceries.
“When they start weighing cash, it’s a sign of runaway inflation,” said Jesus Casique, financial director of Capital Market Finance, a consulting firm.
“But Venezuelans don’t know just how bad it is because the government refuses to publish figures.”
And, as Bloomberg previously concluded, people like Bremmer Rodrigues, 25, who runs a bakery on Caracas’ outskirts, are at a loss over what to do with their bags of bills. Every day his business takes in hundreds of thousands of bolivars, which he hides around his office until packing them up in boxes to deposit at the bank. He says if someone looked in on him, he might be mistaken for a drug dealer..
“I feel like Pablo Escobar,” he said. “It’s a mountain of cash, every day more and more.”
Non-adapted content found at zerohedge.com: Source
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