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Venezuela says it's working on a way to kill Google and Mozilla so no one knows about its currency crash
(REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins ) Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro speaks during a meeting with supporters at Miraflores Palace in Caracas, February 19, 2015.
Some ruling-party politicians in Venezuela will stop at nothing to hide the jaw-dropping fall of the country's currency, the bolivar, against the dollar.
The bolivar has declined 30% in the past month.
Citizens aren't supposed to know that, but they do because of because an app called DolarToday has all the information.
President Nicolas Maduro has said the app's very existence is "economic war" on the country, and it is banned in Venezuela. Back in March the government's attempt to block the app also took out websites like Amazon, Snapchat, and Pinterest.
Venezuelans have been getting around all of that, though, by using Twitter and other websites that pick up DolarToday's content.
This trend led one legistlator, Juan Carlos Alemán, to suggest that Venezula should take on Google and Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox web browser.
Alemán went on TV Monday and said "the problem is that we rely on servers like Google and Firefox that are search-engine technology that we don't have under our national control."
Alemán said that Venezuala's Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation was working on a way to use the country's satellites "so that we can assert our independence and control this situation."
Venezuela's inflation rate hit 69% in December, according to Bloomberg. The black-market-bolivar-to-dollar exchange rate surged from 279 bolivars to the dollar at the beginning of this month to as much as 423 bolivars to the dollar recently.
(Pantheon Macroeconomics)
Within Maduro's party this has sparked a debate about the strange three-tiered currency system the country has adopted. Venezuela has different exchange rates for priority imports. The lowest rate is 6.3 bolivars to the dollar, but most Venezuelans are not getting that. They're getting the black-market rate, which has fallen 82% in the past year. Wages aren't keeping up with this either.
So some politicians have suggested reforming the system, but it's unclear exactly what that would do to the currency. Legislator Germán Ferrer said on Monday that creating only one exchange rate may "start solving some equilibrium."
That said, all of this is uncharted territory, and Maduro's administration may want to stick with "solutions" it has stuck to in the past — blocking information and blaming outsiders for what's going on inside the country.
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