“What does it take to surpass Apple Inc. as the world’s most valuable traded company?” Christine Jenkins reports for Bloomberg. “One way is to be listed in Venezuela, with its massively overvalued currency.”
“Venezuelan stocks are ascending the ranks of the most valuable companies on Earth, with lender Mercantil Servicios Financieros CA briefly topping Apple’s market capitalization last week, and now back in the No.2 spot,” Jenkins reports. “Five other top-20 companies are also Venezuelan, a mirage caused by currency controls combined with the world’s fastest inflation.”
“Most of the lender’s theoretical $775 billion market capitalization evaporates if you stop using the official exchange rate of 10 bolivars to the dollar,” Jenkins reports. “The value would be 0.1 percent of that at the black-market rate that most Venezuelans have to use if they want hard currency.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Venezuela is a rapidly deteriorating tragedy of untold proportion and yet another klieg-lit proof of the George Santayana maxim: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Forget the Venezuela Bank, the whole Venezuela as a country country is worth less than Apple.
Easily.
The socialist pipe dream explodes like a pipe bomb once again.
I assume the abundance of down votes on “First’s” socialist statement are personal? If so, how juvenile. If in opposition to content, woe to us. Socialism is a deceptive plague. It can’t start well but nowhere in history does it not become perverted.
* it can start well
Socialist in propaganda only. What you are seeing is fascism. Trump could only dream of having so much power to pick winners and losers so decisively.
I have a 50 Trillion Dollar bill issued by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe in 2008. I think I’ll go shopping for a country or huge corporation. lol
Quite a long time ago I was in Turkey when they were suffering hyperinflation and I needed to spend almost a million Turkish Lira to buy a a bottle of sun screen. While I was looking in my wallet trying to quickly count how many zeros were printed on the notes, I thought it might be cool to get a load of Turkish notes so that we could play Monopoly with real money. Unfortunately they didn’t still do any low denomination notes at all because they would have been worthless.
Great idea. Might have to explore that in the future.
“Workers of the world unite!”
15 years ago Venezuela was the wealthiest country in South America, now their people eat zoo animals if they’re lucky.
Socialism is a scourge upon mankind…second only to Islam.
This issue isn’t socialism, it was the fact that 80% of Venezuela’s GNP was tied into oil, and with dwindling reserves and a general market downturn on the price of oil, it sent the nation into a tailspin. There were many factors of course, but the main one was definitely the dependency on oil for GNP.
oh, yes it is.
Brilliant, botty! You slap a label on an entire society and then declare that to be the sole factor driving the collapse of the country. Few – very few – situations are as simple as that. None are as simple as that at the scale of a country.
I am not here to defend socialism Socialism is innately bad in concept, but it does not work for large groups of human beings because the wide range of human drives associated with self-interest undermines its function. Humans are not ants.
On the other hand, I also have no problem pointing out that capitalism also suffers from the same flaws of human nature. The difference is that capitalism also leverages those same flaws (along with all-too-necessary regulations) to help offset the negative consequences of human greed and self-interest. Capitalism is far from perfect – it is merely the least flawed large scale economic system that humans have developed to date.
So, as is typical for you, your viewpoint based on incredibly oversimplified concepts that are posited to advocate your personal worldview. Venezuela’s situation is far more complicated than “socialism.”
You comment on Islam borders on paranoia and contradicts the foundations of America and the Constitution that you claim to be willing to defend at all costs. Freedom of religion includes Islam, and Islam is not a root cause of extremism, it is a tool. Other religions have been and continue to be used to justify horrific actions against other human beings. The Crusades, for instance? The Children’s Crusade, in particular?
In my opinion, most organized religions are suspect. I do not take kindly to be told what to believe or to be cajoled or threatened into compliance with someone else’s interpretation of the Right Way. Spirituality is different from organized religion. I chart my own path.
Typo Correction:
Socialism is *not* innately bad in concept, but it does not work for large groups of human beings because the wide range of human drives associated with self-interest undermines its function. Humans are not ants.
True, humans are not ants…some of them, you most notably, are sheep.
Socialism is immoral in concept, in theory doesn’t work economically and socially and in practise has devastating results *everytime*.
It also has in it all the bases that leads to a dictatorship, which in practise is what happens.
Only a deeply naive person or a disingenuous intellectual is able to defend socialism with a straight face, an immoral system that historically never worked and brought misery to people everytime.
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-06/socialism-is-devastating-venezuela-and-americans-dont-seem-to-notice
By the way. botty and Fwhatever and your ilk, this does not mark my return to this forum. I have better things to do than to waste my time refuting your bullshit.
Consider this a drive-by educational event. I accept your thanks in advance for the much-needed slap of realism and logic. A regular treatment of the same might even tamp down the worst of your political proclivities, but I am not your father. I have done my part. You are ultimately responsible for your own idiocy.
“…this does not mark my return to this forum.”
thank you, Jesus.
Do you EVER get tired of being a belligerent asswipe? I guess not.
all right, back together again! Melvin and Cocoa Miss, better known as Tweedledee and Tweedledumber.
You have very bad information about Venezuela or you are just another lefty propagandist. The oil prices went down, true. After that it was more visible all the wrong use of the money that the socialist were doing. Over population of the govern payroll, increment in the monthly payment and benefits to military (obviously to keep the obedient), vanishing of the free trade market, absurd control to the dollar trade, taking away private property, giving away money to Cuba… and a lot more!
The actions that you described may have been taken by a “socialist” form of government or, at least, a government that claimed to promote socialist objectives. But most of those government actions are not tied to socialism. Indeed, many types of governments – totalitarian, communist, democratic republics, etc. – have engaged in many of the same activities throughout history.
Extend your thinking beyond simple labels to consider countries and governments as systems spanning a wide range of models and classifications. Complex situations demand thorough analysis, extensive debate, and well-reasoned actions. Slapping a label on something – all too often an incomplete or inaccurate label – is counterproductive and the sign of a weak and lazy intellect.
Yes, I was right, you are a lefty propagandist. Thanks for the confirmation
The issue is that the socialism in Venezuela lasted so long expressly because the government derived its income from oil and still had enough left over for bread and circuses.
When the party was halted by low oil prices in a world of falling demand due to wider economic collapse caused by peak debt, all the internal contradictions of the Venezuelan market could no longer be supported.
The United States can still export their inflation via the petrodollar. But expanded supply in a market where demand is low could only ever have one result for a country dependent on oil export.
The pain of it was just increased under socialism because there was no one left to tax after the nationalization of so much of their economy.
I am sorry most of you are not well informed. Oil price is a great factor but Venezuelan “socialism” is nothing but the face of a state-cartel and I wish we were under some kind of social order. Nope, in Venezuela we have a Narco-Regime. We have a vice-president, the first lady (highly possible the president) and many principal authorities facing top international criminal charges in the US and Europe, and this is the main reason the country is doing so bad. The only priority here is to protect the narco-authorities with top gubernamental positions from facing international jurisdictions. The national production is being attacked and systematically destroyed to control everything and everybody. So oil prices and even “socialism” cannot be the reason the country is doing so bad.
people of MDN botvinnik- Registered User
is nothing but a lame little troll respond only for fun!
Also a lesson on diversifying your economy and exports…
You,couldn’t possibly ask for a better laboratory case demonstrating what happens when you shift from the wealth creation of capitalism to the foodless bare shelves of socialism. It only took a precious few years. And as if on cue, now comes the totalitarian fascist dictatorship. How many times does the world have to see this before it will admit that socialism, and all of the collectivist variants are doomed to failure.
Next, after the dictatorship is firmly entrenched, the dictator will start blaming the west, in particular the United States for their problems. I guarantee it. I take note,that the head of the U.K. Labor party and our own Bernie Sanders refuse to condem the actions of the Venezuelan government.
“You may remember that in 1851 the New York Herald Tribune under the sponsorship and publishing of Horace Greeley, employed as its London correspondent an obscure journalist by the name of Karl Marx.
We are told that foreign correspondent Marx, stone broke, and with a family ill and undernourished, constantly appealed to Greeley and managing editor Charles Dana for an increase in his munificent salary of $5 per installment, a salary which he and Engels ungratefully labeled as the “lousiest petty bourgeois cheating.”
But when all his financial appeals were refused, Marx looked around for other means of livelihood and fame, eventually terminating his relationship with the Tribune and devoting his talents full time to the cause that would bequeath the world the seeds of Leninism, Stalinism, revolution and the cold war.
If only this capitalistic New York newspaper had treated him more kindly; if only Marx had remained a foreign correspondent, history might have been different. And I hope all publishers will bear this lesson in mind the next time they receive a poverty-stricken appeal for a small increase in the expense account from an obscure newspaper man.”
JFK Address before the American Newspaper Publishers Association, April 27, 1961
Marx may have planted various seeds, like many people before and after him. But the responsibility is solely on those who implemented his ideas for their own nefarious purposes.
You are so eager to cast blame on others. Like Trumpty Dumpty, nothing is ever your fault, and everything that spews from you is pure gold. Your powers of self-deception are immense, and you are not as erudite and intelligent and you appear to believe.
“…this does not mark my return to this forum.”
uh, when’s that gonna happen, Melvin?
Venezuela: The usual result of dire, extreme socialism. Desperation behavior. Totalitarian garbage.
Next step: Criminal Nation.
I don’t think Apple wants to play with that mess. Not at this point anyway.
The CIA’s maxim: To control a wayward nation, promote peace in chaos; promote chaos during peace.
The US’s CIA via their fake NGOs is producing chaos since Bush when Chavez thumbed his nose at Bush. The same with both Bushes’ Iraq and Afghanistan, with Reagan’s invasion of Grenada, Bush I’s Panama, and the Clintonian’s Qadaffi.
Read all about that mechanism is Philip Agee’s “Inside the CIA” and in his vanguard publication “Covert Action Quarterly.”
Problem is that Apple’s iPhone and gadgets did not have enough penetration to divert war monger’s attention to egalitarian stuff.