Venezuela's money is so worthless shopkeepers weigh piles instead of counting bills

Venezuelans continue to struggle as their currency plummets.

(Image credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images)

published 30 November 2016

Already suffering massive shortages of food and medicine, Venezuelans must now deal with a currency rapidly approaching Weimar Germany-level inflation. The Venezuelan bolívar has lost half its value in November alone and is now so worthless many shopkeepers have taken to weighing bundles of money instead of counting the hundreds of bills required to make everyday purchases.

The socialist state is in this currency death spiral because President Nicolás Maduro responded to dropping oil prices (a nationalized oil industry is the government's main source of revenue) with currency manipulation, fixing the bolivar's exchange rate and forcing banks to print more money. The deluge of new bills devalued the currency, which in turn produced rising prices. Maduro has responded with plans to print bills in larger denominations.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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