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VENEZUELA · ECONOMY

A main road in Caracas. Wages are paid in bolívares; many prices track the dollar, which is why the distance between the two exchange rates has been the country’s most watched number. (Photo: “Caracas city, Venezuela capital” by Wilfredor, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.)

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For a decade the brecha — the distance between the dollar the Banco Central de Venezuela publishes and the dollar people actually buy — has been the most honest number in the Venezuelan economy. It was also among the hardest to check. The parallel market has no exchange, no clearing house and no obligation to report, and the series that track it have mostly been proprietary, partial, or both.

On 21 September that changed. Daemon Jacques-Palmer, a Venezuelan-data archivist based between Dublin and Montreal, put his entire exchange-rate collection online and licensed it for anyone to copy, redistribute and build on.

The collection is six files. The official BCV rate, daily, from May 2019 — 1,771 trading days, with the high and low of the bank panel as well as the reference rate. The parallel rate, daily open-high-low-close, from June 2010 — 4,088 days. The spread between them in three resolutions: daily, hourly since 2019, and in 30-minute bars since March this year. Weekends and holidays are absent, because the central bank does not publish on them.

The first thing it shows is that 11 percent is not low

The premium closed at 11.44 percent on 18 September. Read against this year it looks like a collapse, and against last year it is one: the median gap in 2025 was 35.15 percent and the peak 85.82.

Read against the full record it is ordinary. Of the 1,770 days with a published spread, 1,151 had a narrower one. The median for 2021 was 1.50 percent. For 2023 it was 5.07. On 66 days — the last of them in June 2022 — the gap was negative, meaning the official rate stood above the parallel and the government was, briefly, the expensive place to buy a dollar.

Today’s level sits closest to the 2024 median of 12.40 percent. What the past nine months have undone is the currency crisis of 2025. They have not restored the years before it.

The second is that the gap, in money, has not narrowed at all

A percentage hides its own denominator. On 18 September 2025 the central bank priced the dollar at 165.41 bolívares while the street paid 260.50 — a difference of about 95 bolívares. On 18 September 2026 the official price is 849.56 and the street 946.77: a difference of 97.21.

The two rates are no closer together than they were a year ago. The dollar they are measured against has simply become five times more expensive, which makes the same distance shrink from 57 percent to 11. Over those twelve months the official price of a dollar rose 414 percent and the parallel price 263 percent — the bolívar losing roughly 80 percent of its official value and 72 percent of its street value.

That the convergence came from the official side is not new; it has been visible since the central bank replaced its monthly parity with a daily rate set by the banks’ own desks on 1 July. What the long series adds is the scale of what that cost.

The third is a number that can now be tested

On 24 August, in Caracas, acting President Delcy Rodríguez said the gap had fallen from about 30 percent to 12.3 percent over the previous two months.

The direction is right. In the last week of June the archive puts the spread at 26 to 27 percent, and on 19 June above 30.

The endpoint is not. On 24 August the gap closed at 15.90 percent. It did not reach 12.3 at any point that day; the day’s low was 13.17. A reading near 12.3 had last been seen about two weeks earlier, in the first half of the month. The spread then widened further, closing at 18.89 percent on 26 August, and did not fall below 13 percent again until September.

The gap she described was real and large. The figure she gave for it was the best recent number rather than the current one — a distinction that, until this week, nobody outside the central bank could have drawn.

What the archive does not settle

It is one compiler’s work, not an official statistic, and it carries seams. The parallel series is chained across three different sources as each became the market’s reference — DolarToday and EnParaleloVzla first, then Binance peer-to-peer, then the aggregator Yadio. Comparisons that cross those joins are comparisons between measurement regimes as much as between years.

The intraday files have a harder limit. The 30-minute series begins on 6 March 2026, because the five-minute source behind it begins there; before that date the hourly bars are flat by construction. Any claim that trading became more volatile this year, if built on the daily high-to-low range, is an artefact of when the data starts.

And the figures are in non-redenominated bolívares: a rate of 900 appears as 900,000,000, a legacy of the 2021 redenomination that anyone using the files has to divide out.

Against our own cross-checks the series holds. Independent monitors put the 18 September premium at 11.96 percent where the archive says 11.44, a difference explained by where each source cuts the trading day, and the official rates match the central bank’s daily publication to the céntimo.

Jacques-Palmer has said he intends to add batches of Gaceta Oficial and Supreme Court material to the same address. For a country whose statistics have been an instrument of policy for twenty years, a public, dated, checkable record kept outside its borders is not a small thing.

Exchange-rate series: Daemon Jacques-Palmer (xjp.cl), CC BY 4.0. Official rates cross-checked against the Banco Central de Venezuela’s daily publication.

This article was produced by The Rio Times’ automated newsroom system. How we use AI · Report an error