I was puzzled last week when Hugo Chavez imposed new currency controls. According to this article, Venezuela's currency reserves were down to $2B at the time, which is a critical level; but Chavez actually increased the value of the Bolivar when he imposed the currency controls. Venezuela must somehow control all currency exchange -otherwise, how could it keep the value stable without more hard currency? Also, querying the exchange rate with the New York Times or the Economist gets you the values of Chavez's controls, but the same thing on Yahoo finance gets you a much higher exchange rate. What's going on?