Venezuelans Waste Time And Resources Exchanging Currencies Due To Chavez Controls

See Chavez Policy Sends Venezuelans on Cross-Border Exodus for Cash. Here is the intro:

"For Gustavo Posse, the easiest way to get dollars these days involves a 403-mile drive from Valencia, in central Venezuela, to Cucuta in Colombia.

Posse, the owner of a medical clinic, made the drive last month to get hard currency to pay for the surgical equipment he was importing from the U.S. The 58-year-old businessman said he asked the Venezuelan government to sell him dollars. The answer was no.

“I have to change money here because in Venezuela it’s not allowed,” Posse said in an interview at his hotel in Cucuta, northeastern Colombia, last month. At home, “I apply for official dollars for my business but they never approve it.”

Exchange houses in Colombian border towns like Cucuta have become the only “liquid market” in trading of bolivars for dollars after President Hugo Chavez banned currency trading last May and required banks to use a state-run market, said Ricardo Hausmann, director of the Center for International Development at Harvard University.

“It’s a desperate situation for businesses, especially in Venezuela where everything is imported,” said Juan Pablo Fuentes, Latin American economist at Moody’s Analytics in Philadelphia. “These currency controls are like a game. The government looks to fence you in and you are always looking to find the exit.”"