Oct 16, 2026 · 40 min · 11 segments
In 2014, Bolivia held about $15 billion in reserves. By the time President Rodrigo Paz took office in late 2025, it had almost no spendable dollars, just a vault full of gold. What happened?This video…
To understand why this keeps happening, we need to start about 480 years ago on a mountain.
One export at a time.
Imagine a cold, windswept plateau more than four kilometres above sea level.
There's almost nothing here.
Thin air, no trees, no farmland worth the name.
A city grew at its foot almost overnight.
By around 1650, Potosí had roughly 160,000 people, larger than most major European cities of the day.
Those coins were so widely trusted that they were legal tender in the United States until 1857, and they gave the American dollar its name.
Spanish still has a phrase from this era, valer en potosi, to be worth a potosi, meaning to be worth a fortune.
The mountain earned a darker nickname too, the mountain that eats men.
Indigenous labour was conscripted into brutal, dangerous mines.
When the richest ore ran out, the city emptied.
By the early 1800s, Potosi had fallen to fewer than 20,000 people.
That's the first lap of a pattern you'll see three times in this video.
One commodity pays for almost everything, and then it doesn't.
The industry was concentrated in the hands of a few tin barons, the best known being Simón Patiño, who became one of the richest men on the planet.
In 1952, the National Revolution led by the MNR, the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, and President Victor Paz Estensoro nationalised the Big Tin Mines into a state company, Commibol.
It ran the mines and it also ran schools, clinics and subsidised company stores for mining families.
Fast forward to the early 1980s.
Government spending far outruns income and the gap is covered by printing money.
To understand why this keeps happening, we need to start about 480 years ago on a mountain.
One export at a time.
Imagine a cold, windswept plateau more than four kilometres above sea level.
There's almost nothing here.
Thin air, no trees, no farmland worth the name.
A city grew at its foot almost overnight.
By around 1650, Potosí had roughly 160,000 people, larger than most major European cities of the day.
Those coins were so widely trusted that they were legal tender in the United States until 1857, and they gave the American dollar its name.
Spanish still has a phrase from this era, valer en potosi, to be worth a potosi, meaning to be worth a fortune.
The mountain earned a darker nickname too, the mountain that eats men.
Indigenous labour was conscripted into brutal, dangerous mines.
When the richest ore ran out, the city emptied.
By the early 1800s, Potosi had fallen to fewer than 20,000 people.
That's the first lap of a pattern you'll see three times in this video.
One commodity pays for almost everything, and then it doesn't.
The industry was concentrated in the hands of a few tin barons, the best known being Simón Patiño, who became one of the richest men on the planet.
In 1952, the National Revolution led by the MNR, the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, and President Victor Paz Estensoro nationalised the Big Tin Mines into a state company, Commibol.
It ran the mines and it also ran schools, clinics and subsidised company stores for mining families.
Fast forward to the early 1980s.
Government spending far outruns income and the gap is covered by printing money.
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