Listen - this is they key to understanding:

* You can print money, but you can't print value. *

The value of the goods in Venezueala are priced in Bolivars. Bolivars have a fixed quantity.

If you 2x the number of Bolivars by 'printing money', then all those goods go up 'as measured by Bolivars' by 2x.

This normalization happens very - very rapidly.

Why? Because everyone is watching what happens.

The moment the Government prints X Bolivars, banks, currency traders, exporters, businesses basically 'mark down' the value of the currency, or 'mark up' the value of their products by that amount.

Many small businesses won't have the sophistication to do this, but the effects of the 'big banks and companies' doing this will make it pretty fast.

The only time you can safely print money is if there is more economic activity - and the expansion of the economy requires more currency. If you 'print money' at the same rate the economy expands, you can actually hold prices roughly stable.

As for widgets:

Anything produced internally - services, some agriculture - Venezuelans do this by simply 'doing it' - like all other nations on planet earth. Organize themselves intelligently.

As far as 'needed imports' - yes - once a currency crashes this is really bad. It's like losing your drivers license when you need it to get to work. No driving = no income = everything else gets bad.

In the short run, it will be hard, they have to basically live at a lower standard of living and restructure.

Once they are stable, and outside entities 'trust them' then they can get good credit, they people will accept Bolivars as payment etc. etc..

Also - they have to produce something of value.

Think: what is a Bolivar worth to someone outside Venezueala? Absolutely nothing. Really - it's only worth something if ultimately they can buy something from Venezueal.

So - a currency held by someone outside the market is really like an IOU to that country. An American holding Bolivars basically has an IOU from the Venezuealan economy - that can be exchanged for 'something' later, but Venezuealans have to be able to produce something that the American would want. Like Oil, berries, coffee, or some service or manufactured good.

The problem in Venezueala is not economic - it's political. They have old-style populist 'crony socialism', in which the government takes over everything, they don't know how to run anything, everything is run into the ground, and to boot - it's super corrupt: government officials are looting the treasury by all sorts of means.

The underlying populism of South American brand of socialism is much different that Eastern Europe or Asia. The issue is that there is a small minority of 'white people' descended from Europeans who are educated, wordly, somewhat competent - who own and run everything - and then large numbers of indigenous people who are illiterate aboriginals - at least in Europe the peasants had skills and formed an economic base. In South America, they are barely out of the Amazon jungle in many cases.

Now this is a very, very crude generalization - there is a lot of 'in between' and obviously tons of aboriginals who are totally up to modern standards.

But by enlarge, it's kind of ethnic war. The metzo Aboriginals have the voting power - they put blow-hard army goons and bus drivers in charge, their elite peers are just as corrupt as the 'capitalist class' and this is what you get.

The only 'alternative' is basically the 'white ruling class crony capitalism' which really wasn't super good for social progress. They under-invested in education and services etc. and so they lose power.

It's a really, really difficult situation in so many ways.

Civilization takes a long time to build, and can be destroyed quickly.