Yup, sometimes the king of bad predictions finds a truffle. I wasn't wrong after-all.
I suppose we'll have to see what comes on Sunday, Monday and thereafter.
They stole our oil, and we'll be selling large amounts of oil to other countries.
- Donald J. Trump
Sniff, sniff. Do you smell what I smell?
Yup.
Profits.
Venezuela is teetering at the brink and there is money to be made.
The first whiff of this has been what's going on for quite some time in the markets with Venezuelan bonds. Prices of Venezuelan debt securities; including bonds that have been in default since 2017 have doubled in price since the start of the year. Because they're garbage that's not saying much, yet Wall Street is betting that the Trump administration may be successful in ousting Nicolás Maduro and replacing his government with one likely headed by - drum roll please - opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Machado. If successful, this could possibly right the Venezuelan economic ship, lead to debt restructuring and a big payout to bond speculators.
The second whiff is that this is more about oil and little to do with drug smuggling. All of this business of targeting purported narco terrorist drug running boats like a video game is another Trumpian bright shiny object. Both a distraction and mechanism to apply pressure on Maduro. Evidence of this you ask? First-off, fentanyl is made with precursors from China and having been manufactured in Mexico comes to America by land borders; namely Mexico. Secondly, cocaine comes from Columbia, Peru and Bolivia as a consequence of coca leaves being grown in Andean nations. Venezuela has little to do with either fentanyl or cocaine. And if the Navy interdicted and boarded the boats, summarily executed everyone on board and then sank the boats, bodies and cargo the net result is unchanged. The hi-tech, standoff nature of these strikes doesn't reduce the horror of the policy.
It is wrong.
The third whiff is that Donald Trump doesn't want to be bothered by many things including affordability issues for working families and cares little about the drug trade. Evidence of the latter is his absolute pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández. You know, the guy tried in an American court and sentenced last year to 45 years in U.S. prison for helping drug traffickers to safely move hundreds of tons of cocaine north through his country to the U.S. Yes, that guy, the Cocaine Kingpin and wing man to the Sinaloa Cartel's leader Joaquín Guzmán Loera, alias 'El Chapo'. Consider what my Libertarian survivors at the Cato Institute have to say on the subject.
I'm not particularly fond of conspiracy theories but much of this isn't passing the smell test. What I know for sure is that Donald Trump has spent a lifetime running various hustles, grifts and scams; and the position of the Office of the President is a once in a lifetime opportunity to enrich himself and his family. Consequently, a pardon to anyone may result from millions upon tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars washed by means of untraceable Trump Meme Coin, bond profits as a result of regime change and future oil revenues as the cherry on top.
Winning the drug war and building Latin American democracies have nothing to do with it. Our government has a long and sordid history of failing at both.
To be fair, I also have a sketchy record of predictions; nevertheless, Latin American leaders such as Columbia's President Gustavo Petro suggest that - Oil is at the heart of the matter. And Venezuela possesses the world's largest proven oil reserves.
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Data shows estimates of proven oil reserves for 2025
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At a 2023 political rally Donald Trump lamented in a speech that his first administration had been close to 'taking over' Venezuela for its oil reserves. Venezuela. How about we're buying oil from Venezuela? When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over. We would have gotten all that oil. It would have been right next door.
Trump's administration has previously used sanctions on the Venezuelan state oil company - Petróleos de Venezuela - (PDVSA) as a tool to apply pressure, at times revoking or reissuing licenses for U.S. companies like Chevron to operate there. Naturally, internal political instability, mismanagement, international sanctions along with the built-in inefficiencies of a state-run enterprise in a socialist country has resulted in wide-reaching problems requiring complex arrangements with foreign firms like Chevron to operate joint ventures under restrictions imposed by both Venezuela and the U.S.
Notably, U.S. refiners are expertly-equipped to process Venezuela's heavy, sour crude and the country's location makes it a strategically valuable resource as with the passage of time our own domestic production will likely level-off.
And because I hold any number of energy producers as a direct shareholder, including Chevron, this tangent has caught my interest. Besides, if Venezuela cannot someone has to do it.
The Trump administration has officially framed its actions - including a military build-up that includes moving roughly fifteen percent of our Navy to the Gulf of Mexico - as an effort to stop drug trafficking and illegal migration from Venezuela. This complex mix of national security concerns are likely superseded by the President's own comments and equally complex economic interests related to Wall Street and Venezuela's oil wealth.
Seems to me that at first blush MAGA world seems to have embraced and endorsed regime change and the profits that will undoubtedly follow by means of military force; or at a minimum, the threat thereof.
Who knew?
I'm willing to be wrong about all of this. Time will tell.....
On the evening of January 17 president-elect Trump and his family started selling a block chain crypto meme token featuring an image of him lifted from the July assassination attempt.
Disclosed
mere days before his second inauguration this venture is the latest in a
long line of hustles to monetize his followers and enrich his family.
It is yet another sign that the Trumps will take every opportunity in
his second term to push the edge of the self-dealing envelope.
The Trump meme coin is his latest and likely most successful yet.
You're likely wondering why the President is laughing all the way to the bank.
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| photo credit - Al Jazeera |
That's because if you borrowed against your 401K, mortgaged your home, cashed-in all your frumpy, dumpy, boring stocks, bonds and mutual funds and purchased as many Trump meme coins as you could get your hands-on there's a possibility you made a killing. As well, there is a possibility your got your ass kicked. Further evidence that PT Barnum was prescient.
Only moments following the president-elect posting on his social media account that his family had issued a crypto currency named $Trump a trade was placed. In the amount of $1,096,109, from a crypto wallet with a unique identification code beginning with 6QSc2Cx, someone acquired a boatload of the Trump tokens - 5,971,750 to be exact - at the opening price of 18 cents apiece. This launched a run up in the price of $Trump that would swell to $75 a token.
With a balance of only 25 tokens remaining this anonymous trader pocketed as much a $109 million according to an analysis performed for The New York Times.
The front-end profits for the unidentified early traders, including possibly some from China, was at the expense of the much larger number of schmucks late to the game who lost more than $2 billion following the crash of the token's price.
While trading in the meme coin space is relatively new - what is described in the preceding paragraph is as old as the hills. In the vernacular of the stock-trading world this is known as Pump and Dump - with early traders pumping-up the price and them dumping their positions as less sophisticated individuals get in late to the game. Illegal in a regulated market this scam is all to common in the unregulated crypto world.
It is one thing for the Trump family to profit from crypto trading; it is also worth noting that the President holds executive sway over the relevant federal regulatory world. Rolling-back victim protections and enforcement is one thing; leaving the fox to guard the hen house is altogether another.
Coincidentally, only ten days ago The Lever reported that the Trump administration issued a blanket ethics waiver to venture capitalist David Sacks, now the president's special advisor for artificial intelligence and crypto, clearing him to work on regulatory issues directly related to his financial holdings. The waiver comes a month after President Trump fired the Senate-confirmed director of the Office of Government Ethics - the independent agency responsible for enforcing federal ethics laws.
'I am granting you a waiver...of any conflict of interest regarding particular matters of general applicability concerning the digital asset industry' - reads the March 5 memo from White House Counsel David Warrington.
The creation of a financial instrument facilitating the transfer of money to the president's family in connection with his office interests me. The Trump meme coin is ideally suited as a mechanism for, hypothetically-speaking, special interests or a foreign government to influence the President and his family.
The fact that his office's regulatory actions may now shield or insulate him from both scrutiny and consequences interests me even more.
How about you?
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