LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela’s Blackouts Go Beyond Electricity.

Official data is partial, sometimes unreliable and always late. Consider the size of Venezuela’s economic black hole. The central government last published fiscal balances in 2013, and consolidated public sector accounts, including those of the state oil company PDVSA, in 2011, according to Francisco Rodriguez, of Torino Capital, LLC. The country’s latest filing of a general economic assessment, a contractual requirement under Article IV of the International Monetary Fund: 2004.

Inflation? Venezuela hasn’t released an official number since December 2015, and ever since it’s been monetary roulette. The price of a cup of coffee is up by six figures since last April, according to Bloomberg’s café con leche index, while Torino Capital reckoned a cornmeal arepa pastry cost 300,000 percent more by the end of 2018. The opposition-controlled National Assembly is less circumspect, putting overall inflation last year at 1.7 million percent. They have nothing on the IMF, which recently pegged consumer prices rising at 10 million percent.

Keeping track of crime is another actuarial adventure. The Venezuelan Observatory of Public Safety, a government oversight body, offers no graphics or statistical tally for criminal violence, just a single paragraph on its webpage describing homicide as “reproachable behavior.” And good luck finding comprehensive crime stats on the Interior, Justice and Peace Ministry’s forensic division website.

Whatever or whoever replaces the Chavista regime, they’ll have an impossible time trying to fill in the blanks. Which for Maduro and his cronies, is probably a feature not a bug.