It won’t cool inflation AS A solution to rampant inflation, banning price rises and jailing shopkeepers has limited potential. But President Nicolás Maduro is undaunted. In the past year Venezuela’s consumer-price index has risen by more than 50%, one of the world’s fastest rates. Basic goods such as milk, rice, cooking oil and toilet paper are rarely found on supermarket shelves. With support for the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) crumbling ahead of local elections due next month, Mr Maduro decreed on November 8th that as part of an “economic war” with unscrupulous businessmen, prices of electrical appliances were to be cut to their level of a month earlier. For good measure he had a couple of dozen shopowners and managers arrested for “usury”.Shops were besieged by bargain hunters. In the country’s third city, Valencia, looters ransacked an outlet belonging to the Daka electricals chain. Even members of the national guard, deployed along with partisan militiamen to keep order, were filmed loading looted goods onto pickup trucks. Several days later people were still queuing in their dozens and even hundreds, in...
via The Economist: The Americas http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21589891-except-president-least-time-being-everything-must-go?fsrc=rss|ame
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