Spacedad posted:

The chart is for a period when oil prices were low - we already know the country was suffering in that period, along with the various other problems caused through internal incompetence, corruption and hyperinflation.

However, the argument here is about the fact that the US is actively and deliberately deepening the suffering of millions of already-suffering people. Which in turn makes the aid stunt they pulled of sending aid they know would be turned away even more of a morally reprehensible act. If you aren't going to refute that, well all right then.

zapplez posted:

They are already starving. Theres a very real possibility the sanctions are going to cause less net harm because it could lead to less years that Maduro remains in power as a dictator.

WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:

Who is doing more to deepen the suffering of venezuela the US or Maduro?

zapplez posted:

They are already starving. Theres a very real possibility the sanctions are going to cause less net harm because it could lead to less years that Maduro remains in power as a dictator.

Spacedad posted:

The problems originally caused by the lowered price of oil have been exacerbated by Trump's sanctions in august 2017 that caused a massive decline in oil production in Venezuela, compared to Columbia's production.



The sanctions have cost venezuela around 6 billion dollars - roughly 5% of its GDP.

More on that and other issues in detail is in the video I posted in earlier.

Point being - the US is making a country experiencing major problems profoundly worse. And invoking the millions of suffering Venezuelans in the face of this is crocodile tears. So if you really do care about the Venezuelan people, demand the US remove its sanctions.

Spacedad posted:

If you aren't going to refute the argument then that's pretty much all that can be said about this.

Oh and - we (i presume most of us) live in the US or are in a US-allied country. So if you want to do something to really help, demand the sanctions be removed.

GreyjoyBastard posted:

suggesting that 100% of the decline in oil production is due to sanctions - sanctions that were extremely far from a total shutout until very recently - is very questionable

i'll grudgingly concede that greater than 0% is probably due to sanctions

but mismanagement and degradation of the physical and corporate infrastructure of the PDVSA might have, you know, had some impact as well

quote:

Section 1. (a) All transactions related to, provision of financing for, and
other dealings in the following by a United States person or within the
United States are prohibited:
(i) new debt with a maturity of greater than 90 days of Petroleos de
Venezuela, S.A. (PdVSA);
(ii) new debt with a maturity of greater than 30 days, or new equity,
of the Government of Venezuela, other than debt of PdVSA covered by
subsection (a)(i) of this section;
(iii) bonds issued by the Government of Venezuela prior to the effective
date of this order; or
(iv) dividend payments or other distributions of profits to the Government
of Venezuela from any entity owned or controlled, directly or indirectly,
by the Government of Venezuela.
(b) The purchase, directly or indirectly, by a United States person or
within the United States, of securities from the Government of Venezuela,
other than securities qualifying as new debt with a maturity of less than
or equal to 90 or 30 days as covered by subsections (a)(i) or (a)(ii) of
this section, respectively, is prohibited.

Spacedad posted:

Ah yes, famous good-infrastructure-haver Colombia.

Also I'm not really interested in playing goalpost moving about how the US is making Venezuela's people's suffering worse, so I'm gonna leave the topic here for now.

Spacedad posted:

If you aren't going to refute the argument then that's pretty much all that can be said about this.

Oh and - we (i presume most of us) live in the US or are in a US-allied country. So if you want to do something to really help that you actually have a voice in, demand the sanctions be removed.

zapplez posted:

Thanks for joining a long line of idiots entering this thread not understanding poo poo about the history or suffering of Venezuelans

Also nice alt account, first post ever in this thread yesterday eh?

GreyjoyBastard posted:

i'll grudgingly concede that greater than 0% is probably due to sanctions

Spacedad posted:

Oh, I almost forgot to clarify - the '6 billion lost due to sanctions from the US' is a figure that comes from a study using Center for Strategic and International Studies & EIA data.

There's no handwaving about what the sanctions have cost Venezuela. The study concluded that it was roughly 6 billion lost from reduced oil production due to sanctions.

GreyjoyBastard posted:

Squalid posted:

Another thing worth remember, by 2016 it was obvious that Venezuela was heading into a default. This was the tone with which the financial news covered the state of Venezuelan finances. I forget when they actually started defaulting but I think it was also in 2017. I don't know how to separate the effect of sanctions from larger decline in Venezuela's ability to make bond payments. As I recall, one of the justifications for sanctions in 2017 was that Venezuela was already in a hopeless financial situation, so the sanctions would prevent Maduro from mortgaging the country just to delay the inevitable default a few months more.

GreyjoyBastard posted:

suggesting that 100% of the decline in oil production is due to sanctions - sanctions that were extremely far from a total shutout until very recently - is very questionable

i'll grudgingly concede that greater than 0% is probably due to sanctions

but mismanagement and degradation of the physical and corporate infrastructure of the PDVSA might have, you know, had some impact as well

Cease to Hope posted:

that is incomprehensible gibberish

Bob le Moche posted:

Bob le Moche posted:

Cerepol posted:

Serious question here as a non American and in fairly left circles. Does brietbadt carry any water among the non extreme right? I kinda only seen it made fun of I've not seen how much engagement they get for their blatant propaganda machine.

Mr Luxury Yacht posted:

Question for those opposed to sanctions: Are you also opposed to the sanctions on individual persons? Like, not the ones stopping the government itself dealing with debt, but the ones doing things like freezing external assets of military officials and Maduro himself, etc...

Typical Pubbie posted:

How do targeted sanctions keep Maduro from exiting peacefully? Is it because he cant afford a hasty escape to the Swiss Alps if he's blocked from accessing his foreign accounts?

Chuck Boone posted:

There's definitely a tug-of-war here between one's sense of justice and the desire for this chapter of Venezuelan history to come to an end.

MiddleOne posted:

Problem with that theory is that economies like Venezuela are not allowed to default. They can try (like Argentina did, with some success), but it doesn't work in the long-term unless you're big enough to grow self-sufficient or irreplaceable. You talk about Maduro mortgaging the country but that is absolutely the same outcome as if the IMF would be brought in. They'll fire-sale off every asset that can as part of their mandatory 'reform package'.

Something that seems to be glossed over by both sides of this thread discussion is that the Venezuelan economy is not returning to the Chavez peak no matter what. The fundamental problem is not Maduro corruption, nor is it US sanctions. They don't help, but they're not the core issue. It's that the Venezuelan economy grew over-dependent on dollar-imports during the good oil years and now fundamentally can't sustain the same living standards without getting access to the dollar-income lost. International lending and hyperinflation are both just tools to patch over the issue, there's no fixing it in the short-term.

Since oil prices are in a slump the economy will keep contracting until imports matches exports again. Venezuela used to have a certain productivity rate at a certain level of corruption that could sustain a certain number of people at a certain living standard, today it doesn't.

Cease to Hope posted:

are people trying to argue that the US sanctions (possibly including US international pressure like the axis of evil speech and other forms of pressure that don't amount to formal sanctions) had no effect on venezuela's economy, or are they arguing that pdvsa wasn't mismanaged by maduro (and possibly chavez)? i'm a bit lost on who is arguing for what thesis with the various oil export analyses

Squalid posted:

They are trying to argue that US sanctions are justified to assist in removing Maduro from power.

PuppyD posted:

Yep. That's the logic behind this line of thinking. That if you allow the dictator and their cronies the ability to funnel money out of the country, that once they build a big enough golden parachute that they will be more tempted to leave peacefully.

Cease to Hope posted:

who, exactly, is they?

quote:

The Executive Order is part of a broader process of what one could term the “toxification” of financial dealings with Venezuela. During 2017, it became increasingly clear that institutions who decided to enter into financial arrangements with Venezuela would have to be willing to pay high reputational and regulatory costs. This was partly the result of a strategic decision by the Venezuelan opposition, in itself a response to the growing authoritarianism of the Maduro government.

The toxification of Venezuelan financing was much more of a discontinuous than a gradual process. As late as October 2016, Credit Suisse had structured a bond exchange without raising many eyebrows. At the time, the opposition-controlled National Assembly passed a resolution which criticized the economics of the arrangement but did not question its legality.

Six months later, the President of the National Assembly was writing letters to international banks warning them that if they lent money to Venezuela they would be not only violating Venezuelan law but favoring a government that was recognized as dictatorial by the international community.[5] When Goldman Sachs Asset Management purchased $2.8bn of bonds in May from the Venezuelan government through an intermediary, angry Venezuelans gathered to protest outside its New York office and the opposition vowed not to pay the bonds if it reached power. By the time that sanctions were approved in August, Venezuela had all but lost access to international financial markets as a result of the combination of continued poor policies and the toxification of its finance.

Our aim is not to assign responsibility to the opposition or the government for this political standoff. A reasonable case can be made that Venezuela’s opposition was completely within its prerogative to request that debt issuances be authorized by the National Assembly as well as to question the morality of lending to the Maduro government. Our point is that the spilling over of this political crisis into the arena of finance had consequences for the country’s economy and for the living standards of Venezuelans.

Sanctions had the effect of definitively closing the door on any possibility of a Venezuelan debt restructuring. Since the sanctions impeded the nation from accessing new financing, they also impeded it from issuing new bonds in exchange of old ones, the modality they would have needed to use to restructure bond debt. In fact, Maduro announced in November 2017 that he was creating a commission to restructure Venezuela’s debt, but that commission to this date has produced no results, largely because there seems to be no legal way in which U.S. investors can negotiate with it.[6]

Perhaps even more important than Trump’s Executive Order was a letter of guidance issued by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCen) on September 20, 2017, warning financial institutions that “all Venezuelan government agencies and bodies, including SOEs [state-owned enterprises] appear vulnerable to public corruption and money laundering” and recommending that several transactions originating from Venezuela be flagged as potentially criminal.

Many financial institutions proceeded to close Venezuelan accounts, reasoning that the compliance risk of inadvertently participating in money laundering was not worth the benefit. Venezuelan payments to creditors got stuck in the payment chain, with financial institutions refusing to process wires coming from Venezuelan public sector institutions. Even CITGO, a Venezuelan-owned firm incorporated in Delaware, had trouble getting banks to issue it letters of credit.

zapplez posted:

I know some people are saying BBC is fox news level bad journalism now (its not but whatever), but this video is worth a watch.

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-latin-america-47160760/venezuela-crisis-a-health-system-in-a-state-of-collapse

Bob le Moche posted:

Flayer posted:

Is this supposed to be controversial? Since when did it become wrong to defend yourself against foreign invasion?

Squalid posted:

Can you link the nerd stuff directly?


edit: also spacedad, can you link the Center for Strategic and International Studies thing? Would like to see it.

quote:

[3] There are a number of different data series for Venezuelan oil production, and they differ with respect to the timing of the start of the decline. In Chart 2, we use OPEC’s data from independent secondary sources, which presents a stable trend until 2016. This is the series that OPEC uses, for example, to set production quotas. Data reported by the government to OPEC, as well as data from IPD Latin America, time the start of the decline earlier. Nevertheless, both of them show an acceleration of the decline at the start of 2016. They are thus consistent with our thesis that factors leading to a decline of oil output made themselves felt at the start of 2016.

[4] The series published by the Venezuelan government times the decline earlier, beginning in mid-2014. This would coincide with the start of the price decline rather than the low point of the price series.