Caracas
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro raised wages for the fifth time this year and said he wanted to peg prices to the nation’s fledgling cryptocurrency, effectively devaluing by 96 per cent, in a move economists said would fan hyperinflation in the chaotic country.

Maduro made the announcement in a televised address on Friday night ahead of a previously announced monetary overhaul in the coming week that will see five zeros lopped off from the nation’s currency, the bolivar, in a bid to fight inflation forecast by the International Monetary Fund to top 1 million per cent this year.

Maduro set the new monthly minimum wage at 1,800 sovereign bolivars, the new currency that goes into effect Monday. That is a 3,300 percent increase over the wage of just over 5 million bolivars set in June with the old currency but still around $30 at the widely used black market rate.

Adding to confusion, he said he wanted to peg wages, prices and pensions to the petro a cryptocurrency announced in February but which has yet to start circulating. He said one petro would equal $60, or 3,600 sovereign bolivars, with the goal of moving toward a single “floating” exchange rate in the future tied to the digital currency.

The embattled socialist leader is trying to rescue the OPEC nation’s economy from the brink against a backdrop of crippling US financial sanctions, a foreign debt crisis and a plunge in oil production to levels unseen since the 1940s. Widespread shortages of food and medicine, as well as rolling blackouts that have kept the country’s second-largest city largely in the dark the past week, are adding to social tensions.