A friend recently sent me a photograph that tells a powerful story about the situation Venezuelans find themselves in. It's not a very good picture, really, just a blurry cellphone shot of trash: some wrapping material, an old CD — the detritus left behind after a store was looted last week in San Felix, a city in the country's southeast.
Yet I can't stop thinking about it. That's because, strewn about in the trash, are at least a dozen 20-bolívar bills. The small-denomination currency is now so worthless looters didn't think it was worth their time to pick up.
In theory, according to the "official" exchange rate (which long ago lost even a hint of connection with reality), each of those bills is worth $2. In fact, as Venezuela sinks deeper and deeper into the first hyperinflation the Western Hemisphere has seen in a generation, bolívar bank notes have come to be worth, basically, nothing.
Each bill is worth about $0.0001 at the current exchange rate, meaning you need to have 100 of them to equal one penny. It's easy to see why thieves left them behind.
Hyperinflation is disorienting. Five or six years ago, the 500 bolívares on the floor would have bought you a meal for two with wine at the best restaurant in Caracas. As late as early last year, they would have bought you at least a cup of coffee. At the end of 2016, they still bought you a cup of café con leche, at least.
Today, they buy you essentially nothing ... well, except for 132 gallons of the world's most extravagantly subsidized gasoline.
Prices are now rising more than 80 percent per month, according to the opposition-led National Assembly's Finance Committee. (The government itself stopped publishing official inflation data long ago.) At that rate, prices double every 34 days. Salaries fall far behind, leaving more and more of the country to face outright hunger. Thus the looting.
Rule No. 1 in surviving hyperinflation is simple: Get rid of your money. Given the speed with which money is shedding value, holding onto it means you're losing. The second you're paid you run as fast as you can to buy something — anything — while you can still afford it. It's better to hold almost any asset than money, because assets hold their value and money doesn't.
Find a can of tuna? Buy it, even if you hate tuna. You can always trade it for something else. Tuna holds its value. Money doesn't.
I think this is what's so hard to wrap your mind around if you've never experienced hyperinflation. It sounds like it's about prices rising fast, but it really isn't. It's about money breaking down. Under hyperinflation, money no longer works. It doesn't store value. It stops doing the basic things people expect money to do. It stops being something you want to have and turns into something you'll do anything to avoid being stuck with: something so worthless you won't even bend down and scoop it up off the floor while you're looting.
And that's what it's come to — widespread, state-aided looting. The final frontier in the collapse of Venezuela's economy and civic culture. How did we get here?
Not so long ago, in 2015 and 2016, you probably remember reading about long lines for basic goods outside virtually every supermarket in Venezuela. Lines formed because the government put price ceilings on all staple goods, and as you learn in the first week of any introductory economics course, price controls breed shortages.
And yet, paradoxically, the fact that those lines did form was a signal that at least people expected they would find price-controlled goods inside if they had the patience to brave the wait. So when lines began to vanish late last year, it wasn't a sign of improvement — shortages had grown so bad that people gave up. Affordable staples just disappeared from the shelves, leaving only luxury products at international prices that only a minuscule elite could afford.
Instead, the government improvised a clumsy new system to deliver a package of staple goods to people's homes each month. Unsurprisingly, given the dire state of state finances, that system soon broke down. Too few packages were reaching too few homes, leaving a gap that could be filled only by looting stores still selling expensive goods at international prices.
Of course, few stores will think of restocking after they've been looted, and virtually none can find the capital to do so.
So it looks as if we're coming to the end of the line: Every last avenue for people to put a meal on the table has been exhausted.
A video that went viral recently showed Venezuelans literally running into a cow pasture to stone a calf to death to try to get a meal.
How can Venezuelans go on? One thing is clear: No one in power much cares.
Francisco Toro is executive editor of the Caracas Chronicles news site. He wrote this article for the Washington Post.
