The dollar price war in Venezuela

In an uncertain economy, with investors aligned with specific political trends, hyperinflation and unworthy salaries, any subterfuge is good to steal some of the leftovers from the cake left by the powerful, who are becoming fewer and fewer in relation to the percentage of the country's inhabitants.

Venezuela is living a war economy, where the victims are those who do not participate directly in it, and polarization is increasing, like the slingshot left by an atomic bomb that pulverizes everything in its path.

Venezuelans manage to survive by juggling and inventing original solutions that have transformed everything traditional into informal and must daily settle for being inert targets in the dollar price war.

Like cannons placed at various strategic points, the pages showing the values of the dollar in relation to the bolivar handle different figures, which provides permanent confusion as it gives trends but not a real value of the U.S. currency, which struggles with an informal dollarization in a country where those who manage this is a very small group of people or companies.

Those who have analyzed the phenomenon periodically state that prices have a predictable behavior and are tied to political pressures, so that those on the opposition side raise the cost of the same to pressure some kind of agreement, under the table, with the government or to gain some favor or investment from the international operators that are trying to overthrow it.

There are sites such as Dólar Today, Monitor Dólar, En paralelo, Bolívar Cucuta and other cryptocurrency operators such as Airtm, Yadio.io or Local Bitcoin, to mention just a few, while on the other side is the price considered official but used only in government transactions or by traders or institutions that revolve around it, the so-called BCV dollar, a product of the interbank movement of the exchange bureaus.

But it is suspicious that inconsistencies dominate the battlefield, where one should always push upwards and the other downwards, and that trends depend on certain specific dates.

For example, every time the biweekly and monthly payment of public employees approaches, the BCV dollar remains at the same level of the so-called parallel dollar and even surpasses it on many occasions, pushing it upwards, while in the middle of these periods, both plunge downwards.

These changes, which projected on paper resemble an electrocardiogram, serve both sides and these hypotheses have been created: on the downside, those aligned with the government buy dollars that they sell on the upside, using the profits to pay employees, while those aligned with the opposition manage to raise prices every time the U.S. currency rises in value, without lowering them when it falls, causing the market to raise its inflationary level.

For example, a product that costs 1 million bs, rises to 1 million 300 thousand in the upswing and remains at that price in the downswing, but rises again from 1 million 300 to 1 million 600, when there is another upward wave, which almost never exceeds the first, so that the large distributor obtains millionaire profits in a short time, while the consumer sees his purchasing power diminished.

The enemies seem to be neither so brutal nor so adversely equidistant, both seek the same end and the war seen in this way is a theatrical pantomime where the spectator, who is the citizen, is the one who pays his ticket to see it and suffer it, while the adversaries share the spoils.