An ambitious 30-year-old man, Maung Maung, says he has found the perfect investment vehicle in Burma, literally.
Standing beside a battered and recently repainted white 1988 Toyota Crown, he eagerly lists the merits of a car that would easily be considered fit for scrap in almost any other country.
"This car was built before 1990, when Toyota steering columns got weaker and the car bottoms started rusting more easily," Maung Maung said. "Don't worry about the mileage; it has rolled over too many times."
Tracing ownership is not important, he added, because the car probably changed hands eight or nine times since arriving from Japan as an already used car. Instead, he pointed to the seemingly absurd rise in the value of used cars over recent months. It is not a good economic sign.
Although the government says Burma's economy grew 12.6 percent last year, the International Monetary Fund has complained about a lack of credible statistics and estimated a national growth rate of about zero. A recent report prepared for the European Commission speculated that the economy had probably contracted.
"We simply do not know how big it is, how fast it is growing or how it is distributed across sectors, regions and households," the report for the commission said. "Food security is a major problem in many parts of the country."
And so with Burma's planned presidency next year, the Association of South East Asian Nations is looking at the prospect of leadership, not only by one of the world's most repressive military regimes, but also by what any visitor would perceive to be an economic wreck.
Economic management by whim has unsettled the population to such an extent that the banking system has been rendered dysfunctional, and the economy has been permeated with peculiarities out of step with modern capitalism.
Other economic oddities include the half dozen kyat-dollar exchange rates - with one based on the size of U.S. presidential portraits - and an industrial-scale black market money transfer system to circumvent U.S. sanctions that effectively prohibit the use of Visa or American Express cards.
While Burma's neighbors have undergone economic transformations brought by decades of fast growth, the country that made Burmah Oil a global brand and once exported more rice each year than any other nation on earth now imports fuel and schedules power cuts across the palm-fringed capital.
Entrepreneurial urban elites like Maung Maung exploit pockets of opportunity created by the military leaders who regularly overrule market forces by fiat. In the case of used cars, the already small number of vehicles on the road relative to the numbers in Burma's neighbors has shrunk considerably in recent months because of a crackdown on illegal imports.
Dollars remain a popular but risky investment, given the lengthy jail terms that can be doled out for hoarding foreign currency. Dealing with dollars can also seem confusing to outsiders because of the different exchange rates between the dollar and the kyat.
The value of a dollar in Burma depends on whether the calculation is based on the government's official exchange rate of six kyats (which seems to apply only to calculating the size of the national economy); 450 kyats (which a government bank offers visitors arriving at the international airport) or the 922 kyats offered this week by black market money-changers operating in the alleyways behind the Traders Hotel in Rangoon.
Even within the black market, however, the value of individual bills can vary for a number of reasons. Newer U.S. bills, with the larger portrait, are locally known as Big Heads and garner as much as 5 percent more than the older bills, referred to as Small Heads.
The government may operate economic policy by what appears to be whim, but Maung Maung remains defiantly upbeat.
"This is the best time for buying used cars in three years," Maung Maung said. "This may not seem exciting to an outsider, but this is a big time for us."