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| The mighty dolartoday.com says it's now over a thousand bolivars to the buck. |
Those following goings-on in Venezuela's slow-motion descent into financial oblivion should be familiar with the website dolartoday.com. While the "official" rates posted by the Venezuelan government are regarded with deep suspicion as to their veracity--all four (or is that 40?) of them--dolartoday.com has become the more believable source on what the true exchange rate is at which real Venezuelans can change bolivars can change dollars into. The parallel market does not lie, does it?
Aside from the prevailing exchange rate, I also like the illustration of money supply growth (M2), the country's nearly non-existent reserves, and spiraling foreign debt.
As it turns out, the Venezuelan authorities have been trying to put dolartoday.com--a US-based site--out of business for quite a while now. In true hyperventilating loonie left ranting-and -raving style, the site's proprietors are accused of insurrection and generally being Satan's emissaries on Earth:
DolarToday — the Venezuelan website that Caracas has been trying to sue into silence — has survived the latest legal assault. The U.S. District Court of Delaware this week dismissed “with prejudice” an amended suit by the Central Bank of Venezuela, which alleged that DolarToday was undermining the economy and helping fuel Venezuela’s record-breaking inflation...The thing is, if dolartoday.com were misrepresenting the true exchange rate at which everyday Venezuelans can avail USD at, wouldn't folks be selling instead of buying dollars to make a profit out of this website's misrepresentation?
DolarToday, which is registered in Delaware and run by three Venezuelan exiles, publishes the bolivar-dollar exchange rate that’s being offered in the Colombian border town of Cúcuta, Colombia. But Venezuela claims the site is undermining the currency with fake rates. In its lawsuit, it called DolarToday an “illegal conspiracy to manipulate the value of Venezuela’s currency by widely publicizing false and misleading information about it.” It has also referred to the site as an act of “cyber-terrorism.”
Adam Fox — with Squire Patton Boggs, which represents the Central Bank — said the institution is still “reviewing its options” with respect to an appeal. “While we respect the court, we also vigorously disagree with its assessment of its own power to consider the controversy, which continues to impact the lives of millions of Venezuelans as well as the Central Bank,” he said in a statement.
I believe it's a fairly straightforward thing to understand what's going on here: Like pretty much all lse that's happening in Venezuela, the government is attempting to blame its economic collapse on foreign devils for almost entirely self-inflicted troubles. dolartoday.com is merely holding up a mirror to what's happening there, and it so happens the Venezuelan government cannot stand the sight of its own economic handiwork.
Shooting the messenger will hardly fix things.
