Venezuela can be proud: while the US stock market has gone exactly nowhere in 2014, the Caracas stock exchange of the socialist paradise has continued kicking ass and taking names, just today printing a fresh all time high.
.. And the performance over the past year has been nothing short of breathtaking.
However, as everyone knows, there are trade offs to soaring stock markets in all socialist countries, be they paradises or not. By now everyone knows that Venezuela has had a rather systemic issue when it comes to procuring toilet paper, and from what we understand, the local population is still forced at times to wipe with stock certificates.
Alas, things are about to get worse. As a result of Maduro’s recent policies which have Lenin, Stalin and Engels positive beaming from the grave, the country may soon add another shortage to its growing list of daily product in short, or no, supply. Food.
Bloomberg reports that Empresas Polar SA, Venezuela’s largest privately-held company, said in an e-mailed statement that foreign suppliers of food, packaging, and equipment have closed credit lines because of the government’s delays in giving the company dollars at official rate. Empresas added that dollar delays are now the longest since the introduction of currency controls in Feb. 2003.
In other words, with the country doing everything in its power to allocate dollars “fairly” (while making sure nobody has profit margins higher than 30%), very soon the biggest distributors of staples are about to run empty.
Oh well, at least they have their stock market and the “wealth effect”…
And now, in praise of socialist paradises everywhere, let’s all sing along:
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1aqkr1M Tyler Durden