Chart of the day – the Zimbabwe Industrial Index over 12 months:
As Zimbabwe continues its descent into violent chaos, the stock market in Harare continues to serve as a “store of value” – somewhere you can place cash without it evaporating in front of your eyes.
But the chart does not quite do justice to the situation. Go back to, say, January 2005 and the index was trading at 1420 points. By Friday it had risen to 5,418,000,000,000.
Of course, that is in Zim dollars. It looks rather different in US dollar terms:
Go to the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange for oddities like this:
Otherwise, we would recommend ZimbabweanEquities.com, which has proper charting features and even a chief executives blog.
Oh, and check out the Old Mutual Implied Rate – a broad unofficial proxy for the value of the Zimbabwe Dollar to the US$ based on the relative values of shares on the London and Zimbabwe Stock Exchanges.
It’s gone from 6bn Zim dollars to 17bn in the space of 14 days.
Related links
Zimbabwean Equities – website
Zimbabwe Stock Exchange
Zimbabwe crisis in-depth – FT.com