The horror…the horror…the HAT! Ross was so taken with the returns he enjoyed in 2011 that he had three green baseball caps custom-made with P-D-V-$-A on the front in gold-colored lettering. Green was for the color of money, while the letters were encircled by a black ring to symbolize the company’s oil wealth. He gave…
It’s hard to pick out which is the more munificent of the money quotes in Katia Porzecanski’s Bloomberg piece about Wall Street investment banker types mobbing the Manhattan law offices of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP to grill the lawyers with “what ifs” about the Venezuela default they all expect. Is the most surprising detail that such…
This Reuters article on a Boston forum of Wall Street-type investors is very illuminating. Obviously, the markets are jittery about what is undoubtedly “the worst-managed economy in the world.” But the highlight of the article is a quote by our old foe Mark Weisbrot: So I rang up Mark Weisbrot, the co-director of the liberal-leaning Center for…
As pundits mull Venezuela’s big win in yesterday’s ICSID ruling on the ExxonMobil case (don’t miss this interesting comment from Venetexan), the Maduro administration continues to ponder what to do about Citgo. A few weeks ago, Maduro himself had suggested that the Citgo sale privatization was a no-go. But yesterday, Reuters said our friendly French bankers have asked for more…
For years – literally years – we’ve been wondering exactly how much money the Venezuelan government had squirrelled away in its “parafiscal funds”: Fonden- and Fondo Chino-style unaudited, unreported, wholly discretionary accounting black boxes. Finally, yesterday, Maduro let the cat out of the bag: announcing he would finally unite all of these different pots into a…
In the midst of social crisis, an airline boycott and massive amount of bolivar liquidity Ramirez announced that SICAD II will be launched on Feb 24th. Not many details available yet as they will be disclosed tomorrow but here are the bullet points of what we know: Rate will fluctuate with government intervention with fix amounts…
Financial markets are spooked about the last bastion of reason in the Venezuelan government finally falling, according to Bloomberg’s Anatoly Kurmanaev – whose work continues to be interesting and thought-provoking. The money quote: “A spokesman for the Finance Ministry declined to comment on potential bond sales … A spokeswoman for the central bank declined to…
Venezuela is now the riskiest country in the world. This damning-yet-not-completely-unexpected development is not unrelated with what is happening in Buenos Aires. Argentina, who for years has been the international financial community’s “enemigo público número uno,” has lost a string of court battles in the World Bank’s ICSID arbitration court. They have even lost battles…
Let us all thank Jorge Giordani that this phrase is now in a Bloomberg headline. From the piece itself… One dollar buys 41.2 bolivars on the black market, compared with 6.3 bolivars at the official rate… 41.20! que bolas… Update: But as a commenter points out, the best of this too-fun-for-a-proper-business-wire story is this borderline…
This is huge. Apparently, if you’re a person (not a company) and you buy currency through the new SICAD dollar auctions, you can buy as many dollars as you want as long as they are for traveling, education, or health purposes. Regardless of how we all agree this dual exchange rate system is boneheaded (it…
Standard & Poor’s downgraded Venezuela’s debt from junk to useless junk. Why should you care? Because the lower our debt rating, the higher the interest rates we have to pay when we take out loans to pay for election binge spending. In other words, your grandchildren just got poorer, courtesy of S&P.
Bloomberg’s Charlie Devereux, Corina Pons, and Sebastian Boyd are reporting that Venezuelan Finance Minister Nelson Merentes will soon hit the road to see what appetite there is for new Venezuelan bonds. Apparently, the Maduro government needs fresh cash because it doesn’t have enough on hand to import toilet paper. The title of the post is…
Over at Foreign Policy’s Transitions blog (apologies, but you need to log in to read the piece), I take a break from my vacation to discuss the link between last week’s devaluation and Elías Jaua’s ill-fated trip to China: In the last few weeks, reports have surfaced that the Chinese, the main underwriters of last…
(Posted on Foreign Policy´s Transitions blog) A pyramid scheme called Venezuela By Juan Cristobal Nagel Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s embattled president, is living on borrowed time. The real problem for Venezuelans, though, is that their economy is also living on borrowed time, and the day of fiscal reckoning may be near. Venezuela has an enormous fiscal…
El Nacional continues with its reporting on the push to get China to provide new financing for the Bolivarian Revolution. In a rambling article by Andrés Rojas, we learn, among other things, that:
Caracas Chronicles 