When 20% of the population is living off of the 20% of the population that works and pays taxes,,,and the gubmint continues to promote dependency, sh!t happens.
Going over the 40 to 1 "barrier" woke a lot of people up...So let's see: Hipolito is blamed for the exchange rate going to 50+, okay it happened on his watch. But his illegal decision to pay back every penny held by BanInter also had two consequences that most do not think about:
1) The huge so-called "deficit quasi-fiscal" which is the money the Central Bank owes on interest earned when the CB tried to gather in all of those billions Hipolito paid out that caused the exchange rate to go over 50. They did this by offering interest rates that during one auction reached a wee bit over 60% APR!! (Of course this held just for a week or ten days, but people were playing with tens of millions of pesos, so a week or so at 60% APR= a lot of quick money)
2) Anyway, a lot of the money was taken off the streets, the exchange rate went down into the 20s. Where the free zone companies began to cry..
And so the PLD, which never tired of reminding the electorate that it was Hipolito who let the exchange rate go to 50, always forgot to mention that the Central Bank's policies (with Hipolito's approval) also kept thousands from going broke!
And now, the great "keepers of macro-economic stability" are faced with a reality they cannot blame on Hipolito: their social and economic policies have put the DR is a hole they are having trouble getting out of.
Time will tell....
These are interesting times.
HB