A crook should know how and when to quit Syria has long been plagued by a rarity of commodities. When the Baath came to power in the mid‑1960s it abruptly put an end to a then nascent urban modern bourgeois culture, which, among other things, was enjoying the benefits of consumerism. The nationalization of key industrial units and banks has led to an ineffective statist economy. For one thing, the state monopoly over labor and capital has reduced competitiveness and produced shortages in comm...