Wanted to get a thread going on the recent events in Latin America.
Just one more regime change, bro.
How will this effect energy markets? What's to become of Venezuela's oil? Will this trigger anything further? Will it actually help in reducing drug trafficking and money laundering? Was the US justified in the action? How did they pull this off in 3 hours?
Specifically interested in folks thoughts from the O&G sector. If you're in Houston sound off.
I’m an equities guy so grain of salt but my understanding is that it will take a few years to get production meaningfully up. A lot of the infra out there has broken down and will require a lot of capex and time to revitalise. Needless to say the situation could be volatile and I don’t think supers are going to go 100% balls to the walls with capex commitments given the geopolitical shit show that could ensue.
Will probably restrict drug trafficking but realistically we have seen this time and time again. Chop off one head and another one takes its place. At least the border is secure. Delta force are badasses is my key takeaway from this.
Very curious to see what happens with Greenland/Denmark. Trump has doubled down on needing it over the past 48h and the danish PM has publicly stated that it would involve attacking a nato country
Edit: interesting poll;
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/only-33-americans-approve-us-str…
We have an advantage this time. The country has been run by what ammounted to a very violent bus driver, seriously look it up Muduro was a bus driver before he was made the driver for Chavez. Stupid people tend to like to surround themselves with people dumber than themselves so they feel smart in comparison. Fast forward 20 years and you get a goverment run by barely fucntioning retards.
Student here so feel free to disregard my opinion.
Production will take a bit to pick up. Venezuela's oil is primary heavy crude, which is the most difficult to drill and process, but the U.S is the best at it(Gulf of Mexico/America is primarily heavy crude). Tragfigura already said last year that we're in an oversupply, so if production picks up, I'd expect oil and gas prices to decline further. People harp on the 17T in proven oil reserves, but in an oversupplied market already it's going to be extremely difficult to accommodate that. Venezuela being taken out doesn't really impact the current oil game since sanctions have greatly decreased their exports.
I'm a pretty concerned about the security of the drills once they get up and running. The Cartels are pretty much running loose down there, which is a major security risk for these O&G companies.
As far as geopolitical and military stuff goes, Delta Force is the Army's SMU. I am a bit surprised that this was labeled as a military operation solely. I know the capture of Emmanual Noriega has been brought up but I actually thought of the killing of Bin Laden back in the day. We weren't at war with Pakistan, but still went in. The CIA SOG and Delta Force(Tier 1 Special Mission Unit) do this sort of thing. They can deploy anywhere and have the assets and training to do basically anything, anywhere, at any time. 160th SOAR is also incredibly good at getting in and out of any situation(They can conduct Nap of the Earth flying, which is incredibly difficult, especially at night)
Just my two cents.
Not a bad take for a student. But Tragfigura is wrong, the world is in both an oversupply and undersupply position. It all depends on what type of distilate you are talking about.
Thanks for the correction. On a sort of related note, do you think the U.S pushes hard to try and revive and revitalize the Bauxite mining sector? Obviously, it's not even close to the oil reserves or as newsworthy, but it's crucial in the production of aluminum, and the industry has collapsed in Venezuela. The reserves published by the government(Huge grain of salt here) is around 320 million tons, which would places it in the top 10.
The points on crude oil are mostly correct. I would however say that while we are in an oversupply of light crude, which is what we get from fracking, we are in an undersupply of heavy dirty crude, which is mainly Canadian oil here in the US.
Mostly like a net positive for Venezuela but it doesn’t exactly sit right how U.S. just decides to go kidnap a president in another country.. based on what, drugs and machine guns?
I think there is a key distinction here, and that is that Maduro and his government weren't/aren't recognized as the legitimate government of Venezuela. Maduro, in my opinion, is essentially no different than Pablo Escobar or any other cartel head. Narco-terrorism, at the end of the day, is still terrorism.
Now, what exactly we're going to do in Venezuela is where there's a lot of discourse and backlash. It was just five years ago that we exited Afghanistan. No one wants another situation like that.
The US has laws that have extraterritorial jurisdiction, meaning that they can go against any foreigner, no matter where they are and notwithstanding their citizenship, if they commit a crime against the US. As a matter of fact, many countries, including the EU, have such laws.
Regarding the machine guns, Maduro was holding machine guns illegaly. The Constitution of Venezuela doesn't allow public officials (including the president) to hold guns. His role is distinct to that of the army and shouldn't be confused. They passed a legislation years later, allegedly granting the president the right to hold guns, but they are so clueless that they didn't even amend the Constitution to erase the provision I talk about, hence the Constitution prevails over any passed legislation that goes against it, and holding the guns was unconstitutional, hence, in the US view, illegal.
The legitimacy of his presidency is no big deal. You can create a new doctrine under US law to state that the laws applied to foreign officials or head of state apply only to legitimately elected officials. Given how biased the appointed juge seems to be, I am more than sure that this argument will be supported and create a nice precedent for US foreign policy.
The irony is that this will do more to end the war in Russia than hundreds of billions of dollars in military aid has done.
The O&G sector and quite frankly the entire global economy has been screaming out for this since the start of the Ukraine Russia war. The world is swimming in oil and gas at the moment, but what it is lacking is the key types of oil that Venezuela, Canaada, and Russia extract.
As stupid as the governments of Russia and Venezuela are they are dwarfed in stupidity by the government of Canada. You have a government that for the past 3 years could have been making massive BANK shipping viscious crude down to the gulf on an oil pipeline. But no, they have decided to cut their own dicks off and worship at the false god of renewable energy.
In the past five years or so the average price of energy had doubled in Canada. We should contine down the path of civilizational suicide so we can save some random fish that no one actually knew existed.
1: We have to start shifting to renewables. That is simply a fact. Denying climate change at this point is simply ignorant
2: Canada is already basically shipping at its max. They have increased oil production YoY since 2020.
3: Building out the infrastructure for oil is dumb if oil prices are only going to drop continually.
4: Canadian energy prices are high because they can export the oil they have, but they can't refine it.
You are aware oil on Earth will be gone by 2070 (even including untapped reserves), right?
LOL. Do you have any idea how many times I have read Oil will be gone by X date? Dude people were predicting the end of Oil in the 1970's, 1990's, 2000's, 2010's, 2020's, 2030's, etc. etc. We have 300 plus years of oil even at current consumption and expected growth rates. The question is how much will it cost to generate.
When you take into account the fact that methane and oil can be independently synthized out of the air, coal, or biomass, we will never actually run out of oil.
The main way it will affect oil markets is through heavy crude. The US already produces more crude than any other nation, but most of the crude we produce is light crude, which while far better for most products, is not optimal for some products, and more importantly a ton of the US refinery capacity remains for heavy crude, meaning we often export our light crude and import heavy crude. Where do we import most of that crude from? Canada. So whenever Trump wants to start a tiffy with Carney, Carney has a stranglehold on the heavy crude export to the US, which Trump wants to break. Venezuela has the largest heavy crude deposits in the world, along with massive mineral deposits.
As for geopolitics, I would be concerned. Many people draw comparisons to Gaddafi and Hussein, but there is a major difference in Venezuela: A concentrated opposition. In both Libya and Iraq, these strongmen had ruled their respective nations with an iron fist for so long that there was no semblance of what the nation was like before their rule. Gaddafi was Libya, and Libya was Gaddafi. Venezuela is not the same. The people of Venezuela can still remember life under Chavez, and there is a concentrated opposition movement to Maduro. Machado has grassroots support, and the potential to fill the power vacuum left by Maduro. The problem is Trump. Trump has openly stated he won't work with Machado, and this means the power vacuum will remain. Trump is openly allowing for Maduro supporters and strongmen to fill that hole, and these men are going to become hyper militaristic and paranoid of the US after watching the last guy in the seat get kidnapped in the middle of the night. Paranoid hyper militaristic leaders are never beneficial for the general populous.
If there is no work to fill the power gap, you'll get another Libya or Iraq, with unstable governments, civil conflict, and constant wars to control the oil fields. The US might think they can control the situation, but time and time again these conflicts spiral. So while we can celebrate the end of Maduro, who is a horrible leader and horrible man, we should remain cautious about the actual future of Venezuela. The US has tried this sort of "nation building" thing before, and it's failed in almost every nation we've tried it in. If the people don't support it, and there's not a strong government to replace the one you just overthrew, it almost always ends poorly.
I'm waiting for all the America First isolationists to chime in about how this time it's different.
It's unlikely to have any real impact on anything except Mr Trump's ego. With his typical lack of attention to detail or care, there seems to have been little to no attempt to remove Maduro loyalists from most positions of authority, and no attempt made to help the opposition form an actual, functioning government.
I have no sympathy for Mr Maduro, but the half-assed, nakedly self-interested nature of this instance of regime change puts the rest of them to shame.
I don't think of the "America first" crowd as being pro-trump at this point so I doubt they'd defend it. Being on the Libertarian right I certainly wouldn't defend it. Mainstream Republicans I guess would? I'm old enough to remember Iraq and this positioning (granted no boots on the ground) reminds me of Iraq. Weapons of mass destruction=narco terrorism. Boogala boogala time for a regime change so we can get their oil.
All that said Maduro can certainly go f*** himself and delta force kicked some ass, incredibly efficient operation.
I think that there are a good bit of differences. Whether Saddam controlled Iraq or not, made little difference to the U.S.
Whether Venezuela is a stable country or not matters a lot more in regards to waves of criminal immigration perhaps pushed intentionally across our borders, strategic oil for our type of refineries, and general security from Chinese / Russian influence in our hemisphere.
It's pretty easy to scream, "Hey what about America first?" Yeah, well, if my next door neighbor is a meth-head, it's kind of in my interest to get a new neighbor isn't it? When it's that close to home and it's impacting you, it is partially a part of the America first idea.
You can see the same sort of thing that happened in El Salvador with its wave of immigration. Unfortunately, when your neighbors are doing really badly, it spills over to you. So kind of in your interest to limit the crazy happening next door. You could say the same thing about Europe and what's happened with immigration over there.
Yeah, sounds like you aren't old enough to remember Iraq at all, because that wasn't at all the justification for Iraq, which is, from an ethical and legal standpoint, one of the most unimpeachably justified interventions of all time.
We didn't go into Iraq for oil. We barely even went for WMDs (which we found, by the way, and which we now know Saddam Hussein was planning on actively manufacturing again once the US military presence was removed).
Both the left and right have reimagined the 2003 Invasion of Iraq as about "oil" (though to be fair the far left was complaining about that at the time) and "WMDs" because those are easy ways for stupid, uninformed, immature people to feel like they've scored some kind of point.
Yeah, fuck Maduro. He's an evil MF and my objection to all of this is simply an "ends don't justify the means" criticism, not even the remotest defense or admiration of one of the worst people on the planet.
We removed a communist dictator despised by his own people while cornering a massive oil reserve, sticking it to Russia and China in the process.
I’d call this a win.
So true, why didn’t we ever think of doing this in the Middle East!
It was a targeted operation against someone who was indicted and had a $50,000,000 price on his head. Big difference between removing him while leaving the rest of the government intact and invading Iraq.
The situation hasn't really changed: a dictator is replaced by another (same party) dictator. So it looks like it's going to be a nothingburger just to stroke the ego of the US "president"; but that creates more uncertainties in other places (eg China/Taiwan) all the while dropping the price of oil due to the higher output, with the US dollar alongside. I hate Maduro but this is an absolutely retarded geopolitical move (once again, the only ones benefiting from these botched strategic decisions are Europeans). At the very least call some democratic elections to make the whole thing worthwhile and not seem like a PR operation.
Buy Gold baby
Perspective from the UK:
Do you actually think the admin didn't think about who would take over? You can't be this dull.
Clearly they don't care who takes over, it was solely about removing Maduro. If they did care, they would've tried to get Machado or a credible opposition figure in with some electoral justification. You may know this if your news sources deviated from X or Fox
Agree with you.
Its the same shit everytime.
They create this story around the guy (mostly true) then take him out without a plan for the future and no real change is achieved.
Common US
"It's different this time" should tell you how retarded America is in 2026
I think we should mind our own business and focus on needs of US citizens.
Iraq 2.0 - Russia and China will bleed the U.S. through it, and Europe won’t meaningfully back America.
Conquering empires are always the villain. Even folks that dislike Maduro don’t see the Western Hemisphere as America’s fiefdom, regardless of MAGA propaganda and what that bloviating howler monkey Miller vomits across the airwaves: THAT'S the pitch to join up? Armed robbery i.e. resource seizure is being sold as “American Capitalism,” but to anyone outside the bubble, the gap between U.S.-style crony extraction and actual market economics has never been clearer....America looks more like Russia than ever.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is rotting from the inside: debt exploding, politics degraded, deteriorating civil society, and the economy juiced for short-term electoral gain. Yes, let's fucking lower rates and spike inflation, that always ends well. Looting another country and cutting corrupt side deals won’t offset the damage, and unlike the dems, the trump camp doesn't even maintain the appearance of giving a shit as long as they can find an angle to profit personally. Trump is calling for a 50% increase in defense spending while reducing taxes, so $500B more spending against $200B raised from tariffs??? ....hmmmm....a debt crisis within next few years looks like a foregone conclusion.
Ray Dalio is just saying what everyone's been thinking: the next financial crisis will end dollar reserve dominance, trigger serious domestic unrest, and accelerate the shift towards a multipolar world order where America isn't calling the shots. America has long wavered between true global leadership and being just another shitty empire; that choice now appears settled. If the UN is the last hope for global democracy, that tells you how dire things are.
Beyond lacking basic understanding of right and wrong, anyone betting that short-term personal financial gains will cushion the draw down or collapse of civil society and more wars globally is badly underestimating how ugly this can get for everyone.
One side question: do the special forces soldiers get to divvy up the $50M rewards on Maduro's head? JFC at least fucking pay the troops.
I heard (cannot verify) that an insider near Maduro tipped the CIA off regarding where he would be and helped with mapping out the property, and claimed the bounty.
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