MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Venezuela's minimum monthly wage back below US$ 10

The Central Bank (BCV) has been printing money to pay Christmas bonuses, it was reported

Venezuela's Bolivar fell 17% against the US dollar from less than a week ago, leaving minimum monthly pensions and wages at around US$ 9.20, it was reported in Caracas Friday. Set at 130 bolivars in March, incomes went down 69% this year.

 On the official market, the US dollar rose 20%, from 11.69 bolivars to 14.12 bolivars, according to the Central Bank of Venezuela (BCV) while the greenback sold for 18.26 bolivars (from 13.78 bolivars the previous week), a 32% increase of 32% in one week, according to the Monitor Dólar Venezuela website, whose quotation is used for most informal transactions, meaning a 24% devaluation.

As per the new figures, the income of Venezuelans has dropped 69%, thus sinking from US$ 29.68 to US$ 9.20, below the World Bank's extreme poverty threshold.

Venezuela's performance is the result of a “very bad economic policy management” that was unable to capitalize on the increasing price of oil worldwide due to the war in Ukraine, according to Professor José Manuel Puente, a Venezuelan economist teaching at a Madrid university.

Puente also told EFE that the overall conditions were not so terrible as to account “for Venezuela to be experiencing these terrible exchange imbalances with terrible impacts on wages.”

In the last few months, the Venezuelan government increased spending and further issued more bolivars instead of doing just the opposite, Puentes explained.

Economist and university professor Ronald Balza Guanipa concurred: The Central Bank has increased “the issuance of bolivars for government spending” in “activities it is carrying out at this moment” that are unknown, in addition to the payment of Christmas bonuses to public sector employees. The BCV has also reduced the sale of foreign currency with which it had been feeding the supply to contain the exchange rate.

The official dollar (or BCV) stood at 14.125 bolivars Saturday while the unofficial version was quoted at 18.26 bolivars. There is no update on the https://monitordolarvenezuela.com/ website on Sunday.