50 Bolívares Central Bank

Issued to mark the 70th anniversary of the Banco Central de Venezuela, founded in 1940 under President Eleazar López Contreras as part of a broader effort to wrest monetary control away from foreign commercial banks that had effectively managed Venezuelan currency since the nineteenth century. By 2010, the BCV was operating under conditions it could scarcely have anticipated at founding — oil revenues distorting every macroeconomic lever, and inflation already climbing toward the trajectory that would eventually render the bolívar fuerte itself obsolete within a decade.