0% Vickrey
So after much confusion, I finally found a reasonable explanation of the SICAD’s Auction mechanism, courtesy of Bank of America. The long and the short of it is that...
Economy
Sistema Complementario de Administración Monetaria - SCAM
Just when you thought the government’s arcane currency control system couldn’t get any weirder, along comes the Complementary System for Currency Administration (officially SICAD, though I still think...
It's a funny kind of anti-imperialism
Regardless of Nicolás Maduro’s rhetoric, the facts simply speak for themselves: We’re not just dependent on the U.S. as a market for the oil exports that pay for...
Venetur Hotels: where politics come first
Tourism Minister Alejandro Fleming ordered via Twitter that Venetur (State-owned company in charge of tourism services, including 14 hotels across the country) not to hire “…anyone who makes...
"Ley Seca" Chronicles (Updated)
The ten-day ban on selling alcoholic beverages, ordered (and later extended) by decree as part of the national mourning period caused economic losses for liquor stores and booze distributors....
Giordani's Yerkciv Auction - (Vickrey, but backwards)
One of the privileges of blogging is that when you write something that’s just plain wrong, somebody will come along and set you straight quite quickly. So I’m...
Spoiled greens
SICAD has just been rolled out as a panacea for foreign currency scarcity in Venezuela. But if descriptions of the bureaucratic mess involved in obtaining dollars at auction are...
Ecce Vickrey
Setting aside the insane, Kafka-on-Burundanga administrative side of the new SICAD system, there’s a second set of questions that are more macroeconomic in nature – i.e., what’s the...
SICAD: Birth of a Red Tape Behemoth
There was huge confusion yesterday following the launch of SICAD (the newfangled “Sistema Complementario de Administración de Divisas”), meant to supply additional dollars to importers shut out of the...
When cement becomes a privilege
A friend of the family who works in construction tells me about the ordeal he has to go through lately to get a few bags of cement. “Sometimes,...
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