When I was a kid growing up, it was really a normal childhood in the early 2000s, meaning I went to school, we had a car, we owned our apartment, we had electricity and water and we bought what we needed for food. We went on vacation to Margarita Island and stayed in a great hotel. I met many foreigners who travelled to Margarita. Maybe Ms. Halvorsen has also been there to visit.
Then everything changed. We started losing power. We started having no water for days. We had to shower with buckets. Then, of course, we were going up five flights of stairs to bring up food, and we had to plan our food. We had to put our fingerprints in a scanning machine so that the government could tell us what we were allowed to purchase and which day of the week we were allowed to purchase it, and we'd run out. There were price controls, hyperinflation and not having enough cash.
Venezuela might be the only country in the history of the world that had hyperinflation and a shortage of cash at the same time. How do you even have that? It was because they printed money electronically, and then there was no cash, so the economy was dollarized. That was my experience economically.