Official exchange rate of the bolívar fuerte vs. the parallel rate
On
his article last Friday, Miguel Salazar claims that the official
exchange rate will suffer a modest devaluation from Bs.F 2.15 up to
Bs.F 2.90 per U.S. dollar. It is laughable that this devaluation will
only reach up to Bs. 2.90, but I suppose that such will be their
limited action in order to try to simultaneously satisfy everyone,
but at the end of the day no one will really have satisfaction.
During
the initial five years of the exchange control regime the
differential between the official exchange rate and the parallel
exchange rate averaged below 100%. Nowadays this differential,
regardless of an official exchange rate of either Bs.F. 2.15 or Bs.F
2.90 per U.S. dollar, easily exceeds 100%. It would be more correct
to say that it would not consist in a devaluation but rather in a
mitigation of the increasing trend of a sustained greater devaluation
of the bolívar fuerte, in other words a technical rebound. If there
were not a prohibition to publish the parallel exchange rate, I would
gladly elaborate with charts, statistics and percentages, well
supported with comparisons with the local inflation rate,
international inflation rates, and the exchange rates of the
Colombian peso and the euro against the U.S. dollar, how this absurd
exchange rate situation has quantitavely devastated Venezuelan
exports and has promoted unnecessary imports, to the detriment of the
really needed imports that cannot take place. This only causes a
chronic shortage of most goods and services.
The
prohibition to publish the parallel exchange rate is, to my
viewpoint, one of the worst features of the silencing laws, as we are
not even able to quantify how deeply have we plunged, and we cannot
even calculate realistic estimates on the number of years that must
ellapse in order to revert the macroeconomic misadjustment. At least
during previous exchange control regimes (RECADI – OTAC) it was
possible to establish these sorts of projections with a certain
degree of reliability.
Caracas, July 14, 2009
Rivero & Cooper, Inc. RROOPSTR