Venezuela encourages people to buy gold

The government of Venezuela wants to sell gold to its own people, President Maduro announced last Sunday during an appearance on national television. He wants the population stimulate to buy gold and has therefore ordered the central bank to produce and certify gold bars. The aim of this new programme is to encourage the population to save more, which has become virtually impossible due to the country's hyperinflation.

The president showed on television two gold bars that will soon be on the market and that can be paid for in the local currency. With this program, Maduro is targeting entrepreneurs, retirees, businessmen and the middle class, because this group has enough income to buy gold. Due to the depreciation of the Venezuelan bolivar, this target group has few alternative options to invest in.

Gold as a safe haven?

It is striking that Maduro himself comes up with the plan to sell gold to the population, because the price of the precious metal shows how bad things are going for the value of the currency. Earlier, the president held currency traders and speculators responsible for the fall in the value of the bolivar. Soon everyone will be able to see from the prices of these gold bars how quickly the currency loses its value.

The Gold bars are made from gold that the central bank has bought from gold mines in neighboring Guyana. This is remarkable, because Venezuela also has its own gold mining sector and could therefore have supported its own mining sector. Below you can see the video clip in which Maduro praises gold as an investment. He mentioned a price of 6,300 bolivar for the gold bar weighing 2.5 grams, converted to just over 64 euros. That's significantly lower than the global Gold price.

"Gold is a safe investment. Gold will always be gold. Time passes, but the gold will remain. The gold is for the people. This gold bar weighs 2.5 grams and I offer it for 6,300 bolivars, so you can save in gold and own a bar yourself."