![]() Like the previous incarnation of Dicom, the new system will work as a kind of currency auction house under the purview of the central bank (BCV). ![]() According to President Nicolas Maduro’s vice-president for economy, Ramon Lobo, Dicom transactions will now primarily be made through the website, “We will optimise ," Lobo said. Indeed, the idea behind the latest reforms seems to be simplicity – a breath of fresh air for a system that has gotten progressively more convoluted as the years have gone by. In short, Dipro is the currency exchange mechanism for important stuff, while Dicom is for all the other stuff. ![]() For anyone wondering, Dipro is an alternative, stronger exchange tier reserved for priority imports, such as medicine and the like. It was intended as a free floating rate for non-essential transactions, such as for Venezuelans going abroad, or businesses looking to import goods not covered under the Dipro rate. The story of Dicom itself begins just over a year ago, in March 2016. Instead, this year’s reforms are exclusively related to the Dicom exchange tier. Unlike most previous rounds of forex reform of recent years, the new changes won’t add or remove any existing exchange tiers (thank God for small blessings). Naturally then, my eyes lit up when the government announced a few weeks back that it would once again be undertaking yet another reform.įrivolities aside, let’s get down to the grim business of dissecting the latest round of reforms. These have included complaints of a lack of foreign cash to satisfy demand, pricing systems that make next to zero sense, and opaque bureaucracy that just makes everything terrible. Roughly speaking in just four years we’ve seen around five major overhauls of currency exchange regime, each being plagued by a similar mix of problems. For years, the government has been promising to close this discrepancy between official and unofficial rates, mostly through these annual/bi-annual reforms to the official exchange system. In other words, the government’s official rate is 600 times stronger than the street value. On the black market, it’s closer to BsF5900 to the dollar. Just how much lower, you ask? At the time of writing, the strongest official exchange rate was BsF10 to the dollar. In reality, most trades take place on the country’s burgeoning currency black market, where exchange rates tend to be far lower than through official channels. For well over a decade now, Venezuela’s currency, the bolivar (BsF), has been subject to a controlled exchange regime, meaning anyone wanting to buy or sell bolivars is supposed to go through the government. For anyone who’s managed to go through life until this point without knowing anything about Venezuela’s Byzantine foreign currency exchange system, then first let me congratulate you on your good fortunes. Once again, the annual tradition of reforming Venezuela’s currency exchange system is upon us.
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