Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm Orrhe Ogambi.

And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping

your world.

Tensions between China and the West are at an all-time high, well, politically at least.

Thanks to Louis Vuitton Trunks, Birkin Bags and semi-conductors, the business relationship

between both poles paints a starkly different picture.

And the modern game of football is really quite a lot about the game of financing. But in Italy's

top league, a not very rich team looks set to take the league title this weekend. We ask

how it got there on the cheap and what that says about the sport.

First up though.

Recently I traveled to La Paz, the administrative capital of Bolivia. Analanches writes about Latin

America for the Economist.

I was there to speak with money changers, the people who buy and sell currencies, mostly

the Bolivian currency, the Boliviano and the US dollar. And their job has become quite

a bit more difficult because Bolivia is running out of dollars.

One money changer told me he couldn't get his hands on enough dollars to sell to customers.

And people who are willing to sell him dollars are demanding a higher rate than the official

exchange rate.

There has been a peg of six Bolivianos and 96 cents to the dollar for more than a decade.

But the sudden demand for dollars signals a deeper problem in the country.

In February the central bank stopped publishing data on its foreign currency reserves.

And in March the bank started selling dollars directly to the public after exchange houses

...