- Smart move to acknowledge this and go for the debt restructuring while the current U.S. president sees Venezuela as his major foreign policy win.
The government will be able to leverage that to get the U.S. government to push for far more favorable terms for Venezuela than it ever would have otherwise.
- It's really absurd how well the Maduros kidnapping plan worked. Without even changing the party in power, Trump can pretend Venezuela is reformed and do all of the economic normalization a liberal president never would have gotten away with.
But the back-to-back policy disasters are otherwise a good reminder that a broken clock is only right twice a day.
- > economic normalization
You mean the looting
- Man we were getting looted all these years, how else do you think we are now 240 billion in the hole and with 9 million Venezuelans spread all around the world?
- Well what would you do if someone owed you 240b? Debt collectors don't exist where you come from?
- Sovereign debt defaults happen from time to time, and don't usually involve direct regime change.
- Are you saying that Trump will give the money to the creditors? Including non-Americans?
- Listen Citizen, how else do you expect to soften Cuba up for democratic liberation?
An ICE officer has been dispatched to your location
- Cuba just...gave up last week[1]. Wasn't even above-the-fold news.
There'd be no point in any kind of boots on the ground invasion when they just did the thing that the invasion would've tried to accomplish.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/cuba-passes-sweeping-free...
- That assumes the point of invading Cuba is to do liberal market reforms. If the goal is either to expropriate resources or just throw chum to the Florida voters in an election year then it's still on the table.
- Does the current US government have goals?
Or rather, any goal that is not media and PR management?
- In the case of Cuba I imagine it's simply just political control, vassalage, control of the hemisphere. In the case of Venezuela it is Energy Dominance. The USA wants to control Global Energy supplies: oil and [natural] gas. It's all about China. By controlling the world's energy supplies the USA hopes to curtail the rise of China as a peer competitor and prevent other nations from achieving that status as well. Oil is price in $US. Iran was selling their oil in Yuan. That's a big no no from the point of view of maintaining US Hegemony.
- This indicates US already lost and is being a crybaby trying to maintain the current situation.
It will never work to be a bully without actually producing value long term.
Largest advancements I can see in US lately are LLMs and legalized gambling. They are also defunding science. AND they are making immigration harder which basically seals the deal since they are not capable of producing enough educated people to keep doing what they were doing before.
Also OFC Donald Trump who is a ignorant businessman that specializes in a mafioso industry and is a reality tv personality, is elected president twice.
- It's way too early to declare total victory. US also swiftly deposed Chavez, but Chavismo came roaring back.
Maduro himself is unlikely to escape his abduction, but the actual power structures and grassroots opposition to Washington's totalitarianism remains across LatAm.
- The entire situation in Venezuela was only sustainable because of their relation to the US. It's the same for Cuba, by the way.
If the US normalize their relation¹, a totalitarian government will have a much harder time there.
1 - As in "relates to it like a normal country". Treating it like an extractivist colony won't do.
- you can talk about "opposition still remains" as much as you want, but it's the right wing leaders who are winning elections
- I'm not talking about elections that far right lunatics* allegedly win by 1%. I'm talking about what happens after.
* Colombia's new guy boasted of strapping fireworks to cats, and married his wife when she turned 18 and he was almost 30.
- With credentials like that, shouldn't he be working as head of the US DoJ or DHS?
- > I'm talking about what happens after.
and what happens after is right-wing government in power of the country for the next N years
- Kinda like how the USA respected the previous elections in Venezuela?
- Are they doing any normalization? I've fallen behind and assumed it just became dictator apparatus protection as long as there was flattery, i.e. tell us we're in charge and we'll let you ship oil wherever.
- Kinda, if you're the oil industry you are allowed to invest in Venezuela. But in a deep irony it seems like the oil industry is mostly uninterested.
I kinda wonder if the White House has just forgotten about Venezuela - there's not any clear reason they are still under general sanctions.
- The reason for the reticence by the oil industry may well relate to the nature of the deposits. Although Venezuela has huge reserves they are tar sands[1] which are extremely expensive, industrially intensive and environmentally destructive to extract. Most oil companies don't have that much experience in extracting tar sands also. And that's not to mention the optics and political backdrop. Oil companies are used to having their pipelines and equipment sabotaged (eg in Nigeria oil theft from pipelines is endemic) and having to fluff up despots etc to get access to natural resourses but I could see why they might be much more keen on working on projects in conventional oil fields that are more in their wheelhouse, are easier and have better marginal returns.
[1] as I understand it, tar sands are literally what they sound like - the oil has seeped up to the surface, which is essentially a sandy, oily quagmire. https://www.alamy.com/a-hand-full-of-tar-sand-the-tar-sands-...
- > It's really absurd how well the Maduros kidnapping plan worked.
It's almost like people currently in the white house know what they're doing, right? Who would have thought! /s
- They were able to bribe those around Maduro and they gave him up. Thats why it went well. Anytime we can bribe our way to victory, it usually works.
When we can't (Iran), well, it starts looking like they have zero clue what they are doing.
- The same people attacked Iran without a plan for what to do if they closed the Strait of Hormuz
- The current admin has been embarrassingly bad at wielding the awesome powers of the US in a meaningful way.
Of course the US are the all-powerful juggernaut with many levers to pull to use their power. Winning battles is easy. Winning the metaphorical war is harder.
- They know what they are doing in the sense that it is all about the looting
- I'm happy to give charity as a general principle, but here, we're a bit off (the comment is pointing out ~nothing changed, which is accurate)
- They know what they're doing, it just looks like they don't because they're not doing the thing people think they're doing.
This includes the war with Iran. Double dipping by fueling the military industrial complex blowing it up, then they'll be influencing who gets the contracts for the $300B secured. It makes no sense from a geopolitical standpoint. It makes perfect sense from the perspective of enriching influential persons.
- Like him or hate him, Venezuela has been quite literally a fabulous win.
- Fabulous win in what ways, and for who? I'm genuinely asking, as I haven't followed the country much. From what I have read the same corrupt repressive regime, the one that ran the country into the ground, is still in place while the democratic opposition that had shown some life in recent years has gone silent.
- The pro argument I find most convincing is that the US's interest is mostly in restricting oil going from Venezuela to China, which previously was the majority destination of of Venezuela's imports. A similar case can be made for Iran.
China possibly expecting something to this effect has recently built up both it's coal and renewables capacity, as well as an extremely large SPR.
- Any claim at all that Trump is running any sort of strategy against China blows right up the second you look at anything else he has done.
All his bullshit market screwing, tariffs, poor diplomacy has pushed everyone right into China's sphere of influence.
Instead of competing with the products China creates, we leave them out of our own market while the rest of the world continues to buy from China.
The stupid as hell war against Iran has eliminated our stocks of munitions, leaving the pacific basically undefended against China. We pulled weapons out of our Pacific allies to go waste them in the desert.
There is no cohesive strategy and China has been preparing for us to cut off their oil for over a decade now, and has made massive strides in the development of independent energy like Solar to protect them.
- imo this sort of strategy is not decided at the POTUS level, or at least there's consensus. For example during Biden's term the trade war largely persisted or expanded.
Competing in terms of production is realistically not an option (Triffin Dilemma, strong currency means exports other than tech/finance are inherently noncompetitive). Competitive exports would require giving up the dollar as a unilateral reserve currency, and China for the reverse reasons, at least for now, does not seem to want the Yuan to be a reserve currency. My personal read is both sides wish for something like the current system to persist but on more favorable terms.
I agree China has been actively taking steps for this scenario, but that they're continuing to make strides seems to indicate it is still an issue. I think we're still in the thick of it before a victor is conclusively decided either way.
- Yeah, but did you considered that democracy was never a goal? Republican party is in full swing to destroy American democracy, why would they seek to create one in Venezuela?
Bribes and oil were the goal. Consolidation of allied dictator was goal. That worked.
- That's not a bad policy, considering America's disastrous history of spreading democracy and then finding out those voters want different shades of fascism
- America has a disastrous history of propping up dictators who are overthrown and replaced by governments who can then justify anti-Americanism as a populist political strategy.
- Literally nothing has changed except for the names though?
- Yeah, slightly changed market for something that didn't matter that much to begin with. Its was a successful military operation. A fabulous win is WW2, ending the Cold War or things like that.
- Most of this debt will be forgiven or given a significant haircut.
The legal term is odious debt and it has a long history of debt taken out by dictators being forgiven once the dictator has been removed.
The IMF will normally make a ruling on this as to if the debt is odious or not but given how a few big hedge funds that normally go after discounted debt have recently dumped a chuck of Venezuela's debt the writing is on the wall as they say.
I'm not a government credit expert but what analysts are saying to expect 60-75% of the debt to be restructured, not forgiven, in terms of a 50% hair cut.
The debts owed to oil companies secured by oil infrastructure is less likely to be written off as Venezuela will need foreign help to rebuild their oil infrastructure form these same companies, giving them a fair bit of leverage here:)
- > On top of that comes what is owed to oil companies and suppliers, claims stemming from expropriations under Chávez and the outstanding loans from China and Russia.
It seems like China or Russia would expect to be paid not in dollars, but in Oil Wells and Refineries. Why would they accept restructuring of the debt instead of repo'ing the assets?
- If Venezuela used Enron math, then repo'ing the assets could get tricky. Are we sure the same assets haven't been leveraged more than once? Does Russia and China show up with their armies to see who gets it?
- I expect Russia won't be collecting anything.
- > It seems like China or Russia would expect to be paid not in dollars, but in Oil Wells and Refineries. Why would they accept restructuring of the debt instead of repo'ing the assets?
Because a number of those assets are still owned by other countries that paused FDI due to Trump's Venezuela sanctions in 2018-19.
For example, India was Venezuela's largest oil exporting customer following Maduro's election with it's state-owned (ONGC, Indian Oil, Oil India) and private sector (Reliance) majors being given sweetheart extraction deals that India had to freeze due to sanctions.
Brazilian players like J&F Group also did the same thing with Venezuela's ONG industry as did Spanish players like Reposol.
Now that the Venezuela sanctions regime is over, those assets which were continued to be owned by those countries are being restarted by those countries.
The biggest winners of Maduro's capture was basically Brazil, India, and Spain as their companies were able to restart operations minimizing China's near monopoly in Venezuela after the expanded sanctions regime kicked off in 2018 while being nimbler than American players who essentially have to start from scratch.
- Come to think about it, Venezuela owes me a billion dollars too. I forgot to send the invoice. Silly me.
- Guess that's what happens when your entire economy almost only relies on a single economic resource
- Is this a "All your bases are belong to us" move with the oil?
- According to the Financial Times, it will be the world’s largest debt restructuring.[a]
Venezuela's economy has been a disaster for many years.[b] Surely I'm not the only one wondering:
Where did all that borrowed money go? If any of it had been spent to buy goods and services inside Venezuela, it would have led to at least some business formation and activity. Instead, there's only been business destruction and constant crisis. It's kind of incredible that the country has nothing to show for all the money it borrowed.
---
[a] https://www.ft.com/content/b7f25ca2-827c-40f9-ab1a-57067d8ec... (paywalled)
- “Investors have previously estimated that Venezuela also owes $30bn-$50bn to oil companies and trade creditors for unpaid invoices and more than $20bn in legal claims awarded to companies after Chávez’s regime expropriated their property.
Venezuela has also been estimated to owe $10bn-$20bn to China in debts that Caracas previously paid from oil exports but is believed to have stopped servicing, about $6bn to Russia, and $4bn to development banks” (FT).
- The legal claims from expropriation, I get that... but everything else was actually borrowed.
Whether the form was debt issuance or unpaid accounts payable, the rest actually was borrowed.
It's kind of an "impressive accomplishment" in my view.
- > doesn't matter if the form was debt issuance or unpaid accounts payable, it was borrowed
It matters by whom it was lent. Caracas telling China to fuck off is pretty easy right now. Less so if it’s an American investor.
If anyone has an outline of to whom the other hundreds of billions are owed, I’d be curious to see it.
- > If anyone has an outline of to whom the other hundreds of billions are owed, I’d be curious to see it.
Me too. That's one of my questions. The other questions I have are about the shocking misuse of funds.
- Venezuela had one of the largest government sectors compared to their GDP. Their solution to every economic problem was create lots of government busywork jobs funded by oil exports and loans.
Their crude is really only valuable to a handful of countries, the US being the main one. They could really not afford to have worsening relations with the US right as the fracking boom took off.
As their domestic industry shrank, they had to import more and more resources from other countries.
- Into the pockets of the leaders. The people will pay for it through a cut of oil profits for the foreseeable future.
- It’s not only the money borrowed, it was also the biggest oil windfall it ever had during the Chavez early years.
Where did it go? They stole it.
- Corruption.
- Obviously, but $240B is a lot of money for a country with only 9M households, so, around $27K/household. It's an "accomplishment" of sorts to blow up in smoke that much money per household, with nothing to show for it. How the heck did they do that?
- 1. Dictator gets loans for his country 2. Dictator puts the money in his Swiss bank account 3. Government is overthrown 4. The populace has to pay off the debt
Perhaps him being in custody will lead to some of the money being found and returned.
- I don't think there's a Swiss bank account in the world with room for $240b.
There's no doubt Maduro enjoyed some taste of the froth, but this is a silly oversimplification.
- Corruption at every level of government. Everybody was getting a piece of it. Add to that mismanagement, stupid subsidies. Plus they had a huge oil windfall during the early Chavez years. All that money is gone, I wish it was just the money that was borrowed from abroad.
They also spent billions to influence the elections of the other countries of the region. Chavez was also giving away oil for free in exchange of political support abroad. He even gave free oil for the buses of London because the mayor at the time was in good relations or something.
- Isn’t that how private equity works?
- Look up the lifestyle of Hugo Chavez's daughter, or the family of Tareck El Aissami, or the Narconephews affair, or the Cartel of the Suns.
- They caused a 9 million people exodus on a country with about 30 million people. It’s difficult to find a similar case of mismanagement and corruption at the level it happened in Venezuela.
- They have had an average yearly public budget deficit of %4.8 of GPD since 1990. My very shoddy and quick napkin math comes out as an overall deficit since '90 til now to be ~200 billion dollars. While there's definitely corruption, I think that there's also a place for their economy to be in such a bad state that its been a black hole for this debt.
- At least your reply wasn’t written by AI
- [flagged]
- Definitely doesn't happen under capitalism, right?
Remind me again what the current President's net worth has done recently?
- I'm 100% fine with moving almost all government payments to a system where elected officials need to sign off before a payment is made. As long as he/she is willing to be responsible for the fraud that takes place. And I will walk Trump to jail when this happens, just as I walk the names I posted to jail too.
And no, in PURE capitalism, it doesn't happen. It's just that we have too much socialist shit. In pure capitalism, every dollar that is lost to fraud is going to be looked at by investors and scrutinized. And besides it will have only affected the company that did it, not the country and not the voters and tax payers.
- > And no, in PURE capitalism, it doesn't happen.
Just like PURE communism!
- Pure Communism - as in marxism, the default is Elites make choices on where to allocate funding. Nowhere in that manifest is a checks and balances system. So yes, in pure communism, it is a direction to fraud. Not Capitalism.
- Ok ok thank you for the levity, I'm a bit autistic with this stuff.
- It’ll be hard to know where it goes, but there’s a reason why people like Putin are billionaires. They siphon off funds from the state to themselves. And no one is in a position to stop them or even look into what’s going on.
Venezuela was allegedly planning to invade a resource rich neighbor before the Trump administration’s actions, as part of a long standing territorial dispute, and I think that was partly so Maduro could keep the support of the population but also partly to deal with the financial problems. So their leaders definitely knew these issues were building up.
- To be honest that was a huge bluff. There’s no way the decimated Venezuelan army after so many years of corruption could even threaten to invade anybody. Not downplaying the seriousness of the whole thing but even Venezuelans knew that was a distraction.
- They should do an Argentina.
Every 10 years or so Argentina defaults on it's debt. The next day banks/hedge funds line up to loan it money again.
The ways of finance are mysterious.
> The country has defaulted on external sovereign debt nine times since independence: in 1827, 1890, 1951, 1956, 1982, 1989, 2001, 2014, and 2020. Three of those defaults occurred since the year 2001.
https://maseconomics.com/argentinas-recurrent-defaults-a-cas...
- >Every 10 years or so Argentina defaults on it's debt. The next day banks/hedge funds line up to loan it money again.
>The ways of finance are mysterious.
James Grant's Bagehot and Liaquat Ahamed's 1873 both talk about how, no matter how often South American and Middle Eastern countries in the 1860s and 1870s defaulted on their debt, European investors lined up to loan them more money. (In especially egregious cases like Egypt, British and French experts took important jobs at the insistence of the lenders to curtail the extravagant spending; while corruption decreased, the experts were very well-paid.)
- Who lent them the money? Did the government of Venezuela have good credit? It's the creditor's fault as much as - or in this case, arguably more than - the debtor's.
The same applies to some business and personal debt: Sometimes good loans go bad; life has risk; sometimes it's obvious ahead of time. Either way, both parties take on the risk and both are responsible for the outcome. When the creditor is significantly more sophisticated/capable than the debtor - as an extreme example, a credit card company extending credit to someone addicted to gambling - I think the creditor is much more responsible. Another example is Wall Street banks extending credit blindly to real estate investment, causing the 2008 recession.
In government finance, it's a very well-known, well-used tactic for wealthy countries or banks to extend credit to other countries that are unlikely to pay it off (due to limited revenue or competence), eventually giving the creditor significant control of the debtor country. The West used to do it effectively and probably intentionally; China has been doing it more recently. The debtor is starved for capital and won't turn it down; eventually they can't pay and another country has their finger on a trigger at all times: they can call in the loan and bankrupt the debtor at will.
- I know China gave one loan of 50 billion in exchange of future oil production. It was a terrible deal at the time, because they fixed the price of the barrel to a price way lower than market.
And when the Chinese noticed their money was being basically stolen they stopped giving loans, fortunately.
- They should send a 14 sentence MOU to US administration and get $300 Billion
So where is all their money going right now into the middle-east?
Is the President taking a cut?
Investigations in 2027 are going to be bonkers
- This seems really about handing Venezuela back to Western oil companies, apparently by legitimizing the oil company claims and putting Venezuala in their power as their bankrupt debtors. How does all this help the Venezualan people? How is it a good deal for them? Venezuala likely should default on much of the debt and finance themselves through their own oil. Financial Times: [0]
“Investors have previously estimated that Venezuela also owes $30bn-$50bn to oil companies and trade creditors for unpaid invoices and more than $20bn in legal claims awarded to companies after Chávez’s regime expropriated their property.
Venezuela has also been estimated to owe $10bn-$20bn to China in debts that Caracas previously paid from oil exports but is believed to have stopped servicing, about $6bn to Russia, and $4bn to development banks”
But notice that one of the first acts of the new government was to pass laws handing Venezuala's most valuable asset by far, their oil, to foreign companies. Imagine the US, Russia, Norway, or Saudia Arabia doing that. Even if that wasn't a politically disasterous idea - one with a proven track record worldwide - it's hardly the top need of the Venezualan people. They don't seem to be people served by the new government - the Venezualans aren't the people who put the government in power, for one thing.
Control over countries and their oil, including via debt, an old, well-established strategy, long used by the West. It's been abandoned until Trump has seemingly returned to it - as if the oil companies are hoping to relive their most powerful era.
Notice also that Trump's attacks have been on the leading oil producing countries outside US influence: Venezuala and Iran, and Nigeria. (Yes, the first two are also long-term political enemies - you might consider that the oil, inability of US to control them, and enemy status might not be coincidental.)
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/b7f25ca2-827c-40f9-ab1a-57067d8ec... - quote stolen from another comment
- > handing Venezuela back to Western oil companies...
Before the 2018 sanctions and after the American expropriation in the 2000s, the biggest foreign players in Venezuela's ONG industry were Spanish (Reposol), Indian (ONGC, Indian Oil, Oil India, Reliance), Chinese (Sinopec, CNPC), and Russian (Rosneft).
The Spanish and Indian players kept operations at a minimum during the sanctions regime, but quickly scaled up after Maduro was captured.
- Another failed communist country.
- [dead]
- Such a shame that a country with the world's largest proven oil reserves is so much in debt and poverty.
Lesson for the rest of the world is: you go against the USA, prepare to suffer.
Of course, s/USA/China/ or s/USA/Russia/ above in a few years time.
- We are not in the shithole we are because “we went against the USA”. The US was our biggest business partner. Our problem was we elected a coupster moron that destroyed our economy. It was our own doing.
- You skipped the part where the "coupster moron" and his buddies pissed the US off by nationalizing oil industry and kicking the American companies out. That's what I am referring to.
- We already nationalised the oil industry in 1976. You must be referring to something else.
And who do you think was extracting oil these years there? Chevron is one of them.
- >We already nationalised the oil industry in 1976. You must be referring to something else.
Don't bother. It's hopeless. They're obsessed with Orange Man Bad and won't listen to anyone who might actually know something about a topic they've been preprogrammed about.
The funniest thing to watch after the Maduro operation was the endless stream of leftist Redditards (but I repeat myself) rushing to /r/vzla to denounce Trump/USA/imperialism/fascism/capitalism, then backing away slowly <https://giphy.com/clips/hamlet-the-simpsons-homer-bushes-O4B...> once they realize how massively supportive the subreddit is of getting rid of Maduro.
Or, as a post in the /r/buenosaires subreddit put it regarding exiled Velezuelans celebrating in that city, "The left demonstrating at the U.S. embassy and progressivism militating against intervention in networks while Venezuelans celebrate at the obelisk is the best postcard of the transformation of progressivism into an intellectual bubble on the margins of common sense."
- Sounds like we were maybe made for each other (alas alas alas).
- We are geographically close and we always had good relations that were beneficial for both before these thugs came to power. The so called revolution just ruined Venezuela and caused the biggest exodus in the hemisphere. Maduro being captured and jailed was a blessing and something we’ve been hoping to happen for many years.
78 points by cs702 7 hours ago | 94 comments