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Latin America
Related: About this forumVenezuela prostitutes earn more selling dollars than sex
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-09/venezuela-prostitutes-earn-more-selling-dollars-than-sex.html-------------------------------------------
The benefits of the trade are stacked around Elenas room in the Blue House brothel -- bags of rice, flour, sugar and cooking oil -- products that other Venezuelans have to line up for hours to buy at regulated prices in shops, if they can find them at all.
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The dollar shortage is turning Venezuela into a two-tier society similar to the Soviet Union and Cuba, said Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Those with access to dollars such as prostitutes, tour agents, airport taxi drivers and expatriates are able to shield themselves from inflation by trading their greenbacks at ever higher rates. Those who cant are seeing their living standards decline.
Prostitution has become the only boom industry in Venezuelas biggest port. The Blue House brothel is clean and well-kept, with a patio and kitchen where women get three meals a day. Outside, the squares and cobbled streets of the colonial center stand in ruins, with the smell of sewage pervading the piles of garbage.
Prostitutes in Puerto Cabello charge sailors a fixed rate of $60 per hour. They also help foreigners arrange rooms, telephone cards and taxis, charging them in dollars and then paying the landlords and drivers in bolivars.
Dollar Stint
A typical stint with a dollar-paying foreigner would earn a prostitute about 6,800 bolivars in fees and currency exchange arbitrage in the black market. The same service paid in bolivars, which Elena and her friends would grudgingly accept as a last resort, would earn them 3,000 bolivars.
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Venezuela prostitutes earn more selling dollars than sex (Original Post)
Bacchus4.0
Jun 2014
OP
The sex workers are the ones who are honest about how they get their income n/t
Bacchus4.0
Jun 2014
#4
COLGATE4
(14,732 posts)1. Venezuela is rapidly turning into a
second Cuba with its 2-tier economy. The boligarchs and everyone else.
Bacchus4.0
(6,837 posts)2. Boligarchs and prostitutes then everyone else n/t
COLGATE4
(14,732 posts)3. Point well taken. Although it's hard to tell
the prostitutes there without a scorecard.
Bacchus4.0
(6,837 posts)4. The sex workers are the ones who are honest about how they get their income n/t
COLGATE4
(14,732 posts)5. I was going to say that the only difference
is in the amount of $ (or B's) involved, but yours is better.