Thursday, April 28, 2016

This Is The End: Venezuela Runs Out Of Money To Print New Money

This Is The End: Venezuela Runs Out Of Money To Print New Money | Zero Hedge
Back in February, when we commented on the unprecedented hyperinflation about the be unleashed in the Latin American country whose president just announced that he would expand the "weekend" for public workers to 5 days...
... we joked that it is unclear just where the country will find all the paper banknotes it needs for all its new physical currency
After all, central-bank data shows Venezuela more than doubled the supply of 100-, 50- and 2-bolivar notes in 2015 as it doubled monetary liquidity including bank deposits. 
Supply has grown even as Venezuela has fewer U.S. dollars to support new bolivars, a result of falling oil prices. 
This question, as morbidly amusing as it may have been to us if not the local population, became particularly poignant recently when for the first time, one US Dollar could purchase more than 1000 Venezuela Bolivars on the black market (to be exact, it buys 1,127 as of today).
And then, as if on cue the WSJ responded: "millions of pounds of provisions, stuffed into three-dozen 747 cargo planes, arrived here from countries around the world in recent months to service Venezuela’s crippled economy. 
But instead of food and medicine, the planes carried another resource that often runs scarce here: bills of Venezuela’s currency, the bolivar.
The shipments were part of the import of at least five billion bank notes that President Nicolás Maduro’s administration authorized over the latter half of 2015 as the government boosts the supply of the country’s increasingly worthless currency, according to seven people familiar with the deals.
More planes were coming: in December, the central bank began secret negotiations to order 10 billion more bills which would effectively double the amount of cash in circulation. That order alone is well above the eight billion notes the U.S. Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank each print annually—dollars and euros that unlike bolivars are used world-wide.
Where things got even more ridiculous for the government where the largest bill in denomination is 100 Bolivars, is how much physical currency it needed, and the cost to print it..."

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