I have been home for over two months now, and I have only acquired four banknotes of 500,000 Bolivares each. Finding cash is a pain. I went to see if the bank could unlock my old account. Unfortunately, there is no way, and I will have to open a new one. And wait for God knows how much time for something as simple as an ATM card. The wait can be months in this small town.
Anyway, with those four banknotes, I bought a small plastic bag of fresh sardines. Considering we’re over 120km far away from the sea and fuel is scarce, I believe it’s an achievement at this price. Enough for dinner and breakfast for our regrettably near-blind cat and me. Kiddo is not a big fan of fish unless there are chips. Maybe he’s got some Brit genes here and there.
We have enough resources and skilled people to make this country a decent place to live
Venezuela’s disaster with paper money is because of the (extremely uneducated/unwise/inept) politicians trying to avoid one iceberg after another. However, given the actual state, where nobody can travel from one city to another because there’s no fuel, one can reasonably label it as a collapse.
I’m not by any means a specialist in the economy. However, unless you produce the most amount of whatever you can inside your borders, your currency is going to lose value. Our Central Bank NEVER was a real one. It was NEVER independent of the government structure. The government didn’t bat an eyelash before they devaluated our currency. Why? Because they needed to collapse the country to blame someone else. Just like the Caribbean.
Measures have come and gone. Not a single one of them has worked. I do not believe they’re going to work, ever.
And now, we have this:
Venezuela’s Central Bank announces digital currency set to launch October 1, 2021
Venezuela’s central bank on Thursday announced a million-to-1 change in its currency. The change, eliminating six zeros from the bolivar, will go into effect on October 1. Sources say this is the third adjustment since socialist leaders began governing Venezuela. [source]
At the same time, the bank announced it would also begin circulation of the digital bolivar. The digital bolivar will use an SMS-based system for making payments and transfers between users. [source]
Our government’s 3rd attempt to “stabilize” an economy they’re not interested in stabilizing is nothing but manure. (In my humble opinion, of course.)
This will be a faulty initiative from the very beginning
The needed infrastructure to issue a digital currency is vast. People with cutting-edge knowledge and experience are necessary to handle something like this. Hardly anyone with that sort of skill will want to be linked to OFAC-sanctioned groups.
The big winners are those with enough national currency to exchange USDs in the several wallets available. As there is no official exchange in the banking system because of the sanctions, it’s impossible to use the national banking infrastructure, as far as I know. (The very same scheme the Caribbean imposed.)
Let’s talk about a couple of universal realities
Once people lose confidence in a currency, it’s tough to gain it back. This process has been in place since Uncle Hugo. He said he wouldn’t touch the USD. However, once in total control of the uniforms, Hugo gave his speech, “the evil Empire currency must be destroyed, “no Venezuelan patriot should hoard it.
Venezuelans were hoping for an economic recovery, which has been a total mess since 1983. Those years the party with control of the exchange was in place. Furthermore, the ruling mafias discovered they could make huge profits by controlling the foreign currency supply. Some details can be found in this study: Venezuela’s Economy Crisis.
Venezuela’s handling of monetary policy is corrupt and always has been. The government is attempting to “sell” this digital currency as a novelty and a huge advance. They want to provide “motivation” to people to use their digital currency.
I may use the digital currency, but I will not store it
I do not think that storing wealth in this digital currency would be a good idea at all. Will I use it? Sure. I have to prepare for the Great Reset, pay for Kiddo’s school, food, clothing, etc. (Not to mention spare parts and all of the supplies needed to stock up the mountain cabin.)
The only logical reason I see for this digital currency is that it is cheaper than even paper. The Central Bank of Venezuela will simply press a couple of buttons on a computer and magically have enough money to pay wages to public workers. A few more keystrokes here and there, and BAM! You have paid a provider. That, and of course, a cashless society is a controlled society.
Some ambiguous rhetoric in the reasons for the imposition of the digital currency is present like “easing the connection of the population with their national currency”…whatever that means; or “building a modern vision of the currency in the daily trades.” [source]
The truth is, both currencies will cohabitate (that sounds like good news, in the middle of all this mud puddle) “to avoid excluding any Venezuelan.” [source]
As we all know, when the government takes initiatives without a definite objective ( and publicity is directed towards ambiguous and ethereal achievements) is like giving a warm wet towel to a cancer patient. Interestingly, even institutions like the UK Central Bank seem to be researching digital currency.
In my humble opinion, as a world citizen, the currency as it exists now, in the future, there is no guarantee it will work as a value reserve.
Stay tuned! And check out my new virtual store! ~ Jose
What do YOU think?
Do you think this move will work or backfire? Do you think it’s simply a way to usher in a cashless society where every transaction is tracked? Share your thoughts in the comments.
About Jose
Jose is an upper middle class professional. He is a former worker of the oil state company with a Bachelor’s degree from one of the best national Universities. He has an old but in good shape SUV, a good 150 square meters house in a nice neighborhood, in a small but (formerly) prosperous city with two middle size malls. Jose is a prepper and shares his eyewitness accounts and survival stories from the collapse of his beloved Venezuela. Jose and his younger kid are currently back in Venezuela, after the intention of setting up a new life in another country didn’t go well. The SARSCOV2 re-shaped the labor market and South American economy so he decided to give it a try to homestead in the mountains, and make a living as best as possible. But this time in his own land, and surrounded by family, friends and acquaintances, with all the gear and equipment collected, as the initial plan was.
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I think you hit the nail on the head when you mentioned control. With a digital currency, all transactions are traceable, therefore taxable. Neither cash nor barter trades can be traced or taxed, and governments generally don’t like that. I agree that these moves are about control and taxation.
I wonder how those without Internet access will participate? From the little bit I’ve read about cryptos, Internet access is access to the currency. Am I incorrect?
Do you know how many Americans, especially homeless, that don’t have internet, don’t have a computer, don’t even have a phone? How will they pay for items if everything goes digital?
It´s simple.
They couldn´t care less about the homeless. These will be extinct in a few decades. Those less lucky will go to concentration camps with a fancy name. Nobody will know what is living on the streets anymore. They will be slaved by the system instead.
Orphans will go to armies and law enforcement teams. These will be genetically modified. Maybe some others to be used as labor force in corporation-owned farms or factories?
The amount of people without access to Internet is going to diminish on time. MInd you, these are long-term plans part of a bigger schedule.
It´s there.
We are seeing the first steps of the staircase.
I’ve got a better question – how will they pay the illegal aliens, er, undocumented immigrants, if cash goes away? And another – we all know that the reason for the Afghanistan invasion wasn’t to punish a few Muslims for 9/11, it was to restore the poppy fields for the opium. Well, if cash is gone, then so are the end customers for the opium. Nobody is going to whip out a smartphone app or a credit card to pay a street dealer. Methinks certain elements of our corrupt government wouldn’t like losing their customers too much.
I can’t help but think that the powers-that-shouldn’t-be haven’t thought this through well enough.
I think that is a big part of it. It’s likely that it’ll be accessible with a debit card if the entire country is going that way.
Card information can be read from several feet away, so what is the protection from the card? It would not be hard to charge or take money from that card.
Aluminum foil?
My cards are in a metal wallet, about the size of a small Altoids tin.
.
Another problem with digital currency; what happens when the power goes down?
Digital currency also affords TPTB complete regulatory control. They don’t want people to buy a certain thing, they can kill the transaction before it occurs. This is Hyper-Control of the population. I would recommend people to consider storing some wealth in precious metals. It’s necessary to possess the physical metals, but in so doing the wealth is in their hands. It’s portable, divisible, and the value is in the metals themselves.
This is a wild ride that they have in mind, and there’s no way to sit this one out.
Very controllable
I remember many years ago about reading how in a third world country the stamps were being stolen off letters because a stamp was worth more in terms of currency. Bartering is still king when money is scarce.
Now for my view on digital money. Anything that can be created by a key stroke can be deleted by a key stroke.
A few years ago, in the social wasteland of California, I read about a millionaire whom the bank had deleted the money in his account. He was able to get some of his deposit back, but not all that he had on deposit.
I don’t keep a lot of money in the bank. I personally do not have a debit card but pay cash when I shop. My husband has a debit card to pay for internet and items he needs online. We live 100 miles to the nearest grocery store. 25 miles to the nearest gas station and 90 miles to the nearest hospital. We don’t have a TV. I choose not to have a card. I have no credit card. My husband has a lowes card, but gets 5% off purchases when he uses it. We pay the card off each month so no interest. With a digital account that benefit will be gone. Not to mention the tracking of all that I buy or which charities/organizations I donate to.
Now what happens during a power outage? Especially one that takes weeks? What happens with an EMP? If the government wants to go after you all they have to do is delete your account or change the numbers in the account with a key stroke.
I foresee more bartering with locals.
Dear Mette,
The scenario I can see is this: people will believe that everything is “going back to normal”. Meanwhile, our gold psychical reserves are being looted.
Average Joe will be forced to use digital currency and monitored. Every beer, every piece of beef he/she decides to buy will be tracked and registered.
They will force rationing once again. The past rationing back in 2015-2019 was just a short term experiment. It worked perfectly: the aggressions generated by anger were directed towards the people one against the other, instead to those benefiting from the rationing itself, deviating products to the black market.
Mind you this is a world-wide plan in place. We are just the lab little critters that had to bent over first.
It´s exactly what they want to control with the digital currency: people stockpiling goodies, or private citizens doing businesses that don´t benefit the mafias.
There is rationing here. My husband was in San Antonio last weekend for a doctor appointment. He stayed with my mother. While there he went to the HEB near her house for some groceries. There was limit on meat and other items. Right now with cash you can go to several stores to stock up, but with digital they will control your buying. Buy chicken at one store, then denied at another.
I disagree about one thing. People are resourceful. Don’t take vaccines, change diet away from GMO foods and sugars. Except for emergencies like appendixs, etc. look at herbal remedies. Home school as much as possible. People will find a way around the system. Even from being arrested or killed.
Unfortunately, one way around the system has always been the black market. So things will be terribly expensive if they can be found at all. Barter is common there, at least from what I’ve read. I also foresee no more private property. The mafias will own all of it eventually.
@ Jayne, yup preparing to barter is the way to go. Certainly some food, booze, fresh clean cloths maybe, soaps, we have extra can openers, spoons, knifes, pots, buckets, rope, cattle and chicken feed. Batteries too, candles, oil lamps and extra wicks.
I have numerous sealed jars of hard candies put away as treats.
I guess the lesson is to not wait until the buying power of your money is limited, but instead “Git-R-Done” while you still can !
Dear Mette,
That´s the way it started here. It didn´t work though: they asked to use fingerprint registry. And getting rid of the GMO foods and sugars is the best anyone can do. Drop that off your diet and you will see changes in a little while.
Jose-
Forgive my ignorance about how these things work when currency is changed like this. I’d be interested to hear what the buying power of the four 500,000 bills is after Oct 1.
Please keep us posted. And you & your family take care!
In Germany when they switched to the euro it was one euro for two marks. The same went for pay, if you got 2000 marks then you got 1000 euro for pay. However, if a store sold coffee for two marks it was the sold for 2 euro. Pay went down, but prices went up. My step son lives in Germany (he is German) and was the one who told my husband and I about what happened when Germany switched to the euro.
Dear Tam,
You can count on that.
I´m even planning to write an article about that. Compiling information right now to compare. I just hope rationing doesn´t get imposed because I will have to speed up my plans on moving out of town, to the mountain cabin, and there is no way I can keep kiddo in school there…because there are no high schools so far away from town.
I think in the G7 countries, central banks will be able to keep their currencies stable no matter what. By this, I mean that inflation will be within moderate bounds, as measured by the central banks. I don’t mean that your salary will be enough to pay for your needs, just that if things get tough, you won’t see a spiral of wages and stuff going up a lot at the same time (rampant inflation), or wages and stuff going down (deflation). Your wages will probably stay about the same while stuff creeps up in price, and central banks will congratulate themselves for a job well done, because this is the option where money keeps most of its “store of value” property.
Even in that case, money will effectively be losing value. Generally speaking, I think it’s best to have enough savings to cover for possible emergencies, and not much more in savings. It’s better to invest your money in useful stuff that is likely to keep its value. What sort of stuff is best depends on your circumstances. Some things that are likely to keep value are: land, houses in good locations, tools (including machine tools), modest luxuries (cheap gold rings are more likely to keep value than expensive ones because more people will be able to afford them), essential consumables (like batteries).
The Vaccine Passport is just one of many steps to get used to the government controlling all we do. As many of the alternative social media sites have found out, if those in control don’t like your message they want to be able to deplatform, deperson, or defund you. This is a part of that process. One of the social media sites I belong to has been deplatformed and taken off of the App Stores. The same goes for credit card payment processing. As Daisy has experienced, those who control the funds want to control the message. I think the taxing is important with digital currency, but the control is what they are after.
I do believe that the digital currency will stabilize the economy. Not at first, certainly. However, once a few kinks are worked out, everyone gets the new National ID Card that is also the repository of medical information, financial information, etc. It will not matter if you are homeless, you will still get a card. Anything you get, by working, from the government, sale of possessions, and so forth, will be added to the money account.
Since only approved sellers (and buyers for some things) will have the means to do transactions, it will make it easy to track everyone and everything they do that has any monetary aspect, fuel, cell phone, vehicle, and on and on.
Once the physical currency is removed from circulation, which I believe will be when the ID Plus cards are fully distributed, there will be no need for the physical paper and/or coin. Everything a person will need, and many they always want will have authorized sellers with the computer register connected to the internet.
Things will be stable at that point. Excepting, of course, the illegal actions of barter and trade. No face-to-face. It all has to go through a licensed buyer and seller. It will all be on the two cards. Easy peasy.
Now, I am not saying that this will work long-term… Or even short-term. However, it will be pushed through with full UN support as part of UN Agenda 2030. It will be the testbed to iron out the kinks in the various parts of the system. Then, with a ‘proven’ system that has been shown to work, the mandates will be announced and the pursuit of them will follow in a very hard core manner.
And there will be ways around it, of course. People always find a way. Usually at great expense. At least they will get what they want, rather than what they are allowed to have. I know it is not possible for the majority of the population, but those that can, with every spare Bolivar they can get their hands on. Liquidate everything not necessary for the next twenty-years and use those sources of money to stock up on the things that experience has shown you will be in short supply. These will be for your own use, and when the time is right, for barter and trade when it will not be such a deadly process the way it will initially.
Here in the US it will be similar, though not identical. Same recommendations, though with a broader selection of goods. Setting up a small business to earn the necessary income to pay with our new cryptocurrency for the things that it must be used for or serious trouble is on your doorstep.
This may require some additional storage space. Preferably without any records where possible, and when not possible, an acceptable, reasonable, logical, explanation why you no longer have that storage. Equivalent, but hopefully much better though out than the common boating accident that loses all a person’s firearms in deep, uncharted waters.
Be aware that some of these ideas, and that is all they are, ideas for discussion, could be considered illegal in Venezuela at some point, if not already. The same for the US at some point. Actually, any country that goes with the mandated cryptocurrency will have to do the same thing.
Well, I will bring this diatribe to an end. Remember that is, as always:
Just my opinion.
There is more going on worldwide in the war for, and against, a cashless economy than we could possibly cover here. So far, one of the best news aggregators I’ve found is
https://www.cashless-economy.com/
to monitor (and try to make sense of) this struggle between 1) governments, central banks, and their politically favored mega-corporations — all of which benefit from stealing purchasing power from the rest of the population by counterfeiting, VERSUS 2) those general populations the aforementioned predators prey on.
This war over institutional theft of purchasing power by counterfeiting the currency dates all the way back to the 1694 creation of the Bank of England after a previous monarch tried to raise taxes above what the population would tolerate to fund his favorite wars — and got his head chopped off instead.
The central banking scam was a more protected form of thievery compared to the centuries-earlier goldsmiths’ practice of fraudulently creating way more receipts for gold they were holding on deposit for the real owners …than actual gold amounts on hand. When caught, it was a death penalty offense. Then a central bank was created to regularly commit the same crime, euphemistically labeled “inflation”, for the benefit of a predatory government whose monopoly on the police power kept the central bankers from losing their heads — while keeping the general population mystified as to why prices kept rising as their currency’s purchasing power was regularly being stolen.
Today the threat of a digital-only cashless economy adds the element of iron-fisted CONTROL to the tyrants’ bag of dirty tricks that they’ve never had before in history. It doesn’t rule out barter as a competitive threat (whether with easily divisible goods like grains, alcohol, silver, bullets or some foods — or much more troublesome goods that take more effort to find the right seller to accept them). The rise of the digital internet makes possible another competitive threat to the central government and central banking monopoly counterfeiters — that of crypto-currencies.
Some cryptos are hosted by third parties (called custodial accounts) like PayPal, etc which are pitifully easy for central governments to regulate, tax, or outlaw without mercy. But other cryptos reside in software only with no third party custodian that might have potential KYC (Know Your Customer) reporting obligations to a government obsessed with penalizing any competitive threat to their highly profitable counterfeiting. The label for such no-third-party accounts is “non-custodial”. There is a legal foodfight going on in the US Biden government over how, if possible, to control, tax, or penalize such non-custodial accounts and I don’t know how that will turn out.
In the meantime I’m reading that cryptos are becoming a popular monetary alternative in several 3rd world countries — an alternative that wasn’t available back in 1923 when the German Weimar Republic’s currency was hyper-inflated to destruction. I’m also seeing where de-centralized internets are under development that could, among other things, serve as a platform for such non-custodial cryptos and transactions … and possibly beyond any government’s reach.
Now consider the WEF globalist simulation this last July, called Cyber Polygon, about a massive power grid shutdown. Such a shutdown, while it might temporarily get in the way of cryptos, would ALSO get in the way of the WEF’s plan for a cashless economy. So they couldn’t afford to plan for a power grid shutdown for very long.
So the global war for local de-centralized transactions and decision-making is not lost … at least not yet.
–Lewis
“Now consider the WEF globalist simulation this last July, called Cyber Polygon, about a massive power grid shutdown. Such a shutdown, while it might temporarily get in the way of cryptos, would ALSO get in the way of the WEF’s plan for a cashless economy. So they couldn’t afford to plan for a power grid shutdown for very long.”
Says who?
If I control the power, and my buddies control food and fuel, who cares about 00-11-00-111’s?
We still have the power (literally and figuratively)to devise a feudal agreement to our advantage (we being me and my buddies).
Your construct is based on a commodity you cannot control and only (pathetically) individually has value by your consumption ( electrical creation,transmission and distribution) or ability to access or transfer through approved means.
Anything that has to pass through an avenue or occupy space and incur penalties or liabilities does not have intrinsic value. Especially if those avenues and spaces are being defined by legislative bodies.
Is the author reporting from Bernizualia or not?
In the US it’s common for a stringer to say “live from Washington DC” when in effect they are reading AP copy and rewriting from their kitchen table in Phoenix.
He is in Venezuela.
Dear 79Jupiters
Of course I am here. Maybe you would like to check my YouTube channel? I upload a couple of videos every now and then that you may find interesting. Not too long, it´s true, but I feel like videoing 15 minutes is too much. I´m a practical man.
You get the real deal, boots-on-the-ground, amigo 🙂
They were talking about this not being far off in Australia either . I’m hoping it doesn’t come to pass here. There is a massive push here to accept it. I’m personally not a fan.
Dear Issy,
I´m afraid Australia is going to become a Neo Cuba in the near future. No matter what our Brit friends can say. Mandatory injection of experimental compounds? Prime Minister faking getting the jab? I feel sorry for them. Go figure. They may have a first world health system and a strong economy but I just see no possibility of people being free in that country. They´re way too close to the humongous influence of Chinese and their ambitions. At least we have an history of fighting for our freedom.
They seem to be too busy with the multi-gender debate and their comfy lives to realize what is happening.
Stay tuned!