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By Dimitra DeFotis
Venezuela’s socialist President Nicolás Maduro charges DolarToday.com with waging an “economic war” by setting the black-market bolivar-dollar exchange rate online, from the United States.
The president of DolarToday, “one of Venezuela’s most popular and insurgent websites,” is Gustavo Díaz, a Home Depot employee in Alabama. The Wall Street Journal profile of Diaz notes that he is a former U.S.-trained military colonel who participated in a 2002 Venezuela coup attempt; he is working with two others on the site, also in the U.S. Diaz was granted U.S. political asylum in 2005. The WSJ adds:
Díaz says he “is fighting for economic freedom and for Venezuelans’ access to information in a country that makes financial and other data secret. Venezuela is undergoing a brutal recession that has made it hard for most of the country’s 30 million people to find enough food and medicine. “It’s ironic that with DolarToday in Alabama, I do more damage to the government than I did as a military man in Venezuela,” said Mr. Díaz … Although about $15 million changes hands daily on the Venezuelan black market, Mr. Díaz said he makes little from the Delaware-registered website, which is free to access. The company’s three founding partners—Mr. Díaz, a real-estate agent in Miami and a supermarket technology technician in Seattle—recoup $4,500 a month from selling advertising …”
Prof. Steve Hanke, director of the Johns Hopkins-Cato Institute Troubled Currencies Project said recently that Venezuela’s inflation rate is near 75% and will not approach 500% by the end of 2016 as some estimate. Either way, it’s outrageously high. See our free posts Venezuela: How Hyper Is Inflation?, OPEC Oil Cuts? Iran Pumps, Saudi Arabia & Venezuela Down, Who Can Reverse Venezuela’s Food & Medicine Crisis? and Venezuela Taps Vatican As Economy Crumbles.
Last year, in a lawsuit (posted on Scribd), the Venezuelan government charged DolarToday with manufacturing the exchange rate, profiting from it and seeking to overthrow the government. See our post, As Venezuela Suit Defends Currency, Does Debt Default Loom?
Bond investments in Petroleos de Venezuela, the state-controlled oil producer known as Pdvsa, were among the top 25 holdings in the VanEck Vectors Emerging Markets High Yield Bond exchange-traded fund (HYEM) as of Sept. 30, according to Morningstar.com. Venezuelan government debt is among the top holdings in the iShares JPMorgan USD Emerging Markets Bond ETF (EMB).
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