A supermarket in Venezuela.
(Image credit: FEDERICO PARRA/AFP/Getty Images)

Venezuela's currency, the bolivar, has been subject to hyperinflation for months, with shopkeepers reportedly weighing bundles of near-worthless bills rather than counting them. The bolivar's value changes so often now, Reuters reports, that Venezuelans increasingly refuse to accept their own country's money in a desperate bid to retain real purchasing power.

In place of the bolivar, the dollar is demanded. "I can't think in bolivars anymore, because you have to give a different price every hour," a jeweler named Yoselin Aguirre told Reuters. "To survive, you have to dollarize," he added, which is why his prices are now tied to the dollar.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.