“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.