Venezuela ...een prachtig land aan een zinloze afgrond... #3

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Door de grote prijsstijging van onder meer aardgas en bodemschatten is de opbrengst van de Boliviaanse export sinds 2006 vernegenvoudigd.

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Op maandag 13 oktober 2014 10:52 schreef Individual het volgende:
[..]
Morales gaat op voor derde termijn in Bolivia
Hoe heeft Morales het gedaan? Wat voor deel van de bodemschatten is hun economie? Is dit een herhaling van Chavez of doet ie het toch wel beter?

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Op maandag 13 oktober 2014 01:30 schreef DiegoArmandoMaradona het volgende:
Argentinie?

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Venezuela Default Almost Certain

Harvard Economists Say

By Sebastian Boyd and Anatoly Kurmanaev Oct 13, 2014 11:25 PM GMT+0200

Venezuela should default on its foreign debt as a shortage of dollars makes it impossible for the government to meet its citizens’ basic needs, Harvard University economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff said.

The economy is so badly managed that per-capita gross domestic product is 2 percent below 1970 levels, the professors wrote in an opinion piece published by Project Syndicate today. A decade of currency controls has made dollars scarce in the country with the world’s biggest oil reserves, causing shortages of everything from deodorant to airplane tickets.

“Given that the government is defaulting in numerous ways on its domestic residents already, the historical cross-country probability of an external default is close to” 100 percent, Reinhart and Rogoff wrote. “External default would be a good thing.”

The suggestion that the country stop servicing its bonds comes a month after Harvard colleagues Ricardo Hausmann and Miguel Angel Santos wrote that Venezuela should consider defaulting given that it was piling up arrears to importers. Venezuela owes about $21 billion to domestic companies and airlines, according to Caracas-based consultancy Ecoanalitica.

Venezuelan debt is the riskiest in the world, yielding 15.42 percentage points more than similar maturity Treasuries, according to data compiled by JPMorgan Chase & Co. The cost to insure the country’s bonds against default with credit-default swaps is also the highest for any government globally.

“Given that the government is defaulting in numerous ways on its domestic residents.
Bond Decline

The country’s bonds fell 1.9 percent on Sept. 5, the day Hausmann and Santos published their article, and 4.4 percent on Sept. 8, the next trading day.

The two-day decline was the steepest in more than a year. President Nicolas Maduro dubbed Hausmann a “financial hitman” and “outlaw,” and instructed the attorney general and public prosecutor to take “actions” against the Venezuelan-born professor for seeking to destabilize the country.

“Given the depth and breadth of the deepening crisis that Venezuela is facing, Maduro’s efforts and attention would be best directed at resolving the country’s problems, rather than at lashing out against scholars stating uncomfortable truths,” Reinhart and Rogoff wrote.

Venezuela this month paid back $1.5 billion of debt that matured on Oct. 8. It dipped into its international reserves to make the payment, pushing them to an 11-year low of $19.8 billion. The payment didn’t end the decline in the country’s bonds, which have lost 22 percent in the past three months.
IMF Economist

State-owned oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA is due to pay back $3 billion of maturing bonds on Oct. 28. It has already bought back 60 percent of the debt, a company official said Oct. 10. The company will also pay interest on bonds due in 2017, 2027 and 2037 on Oct. 14, it said in an e-mailed statement yesterday.

Rogoff is the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and author of a 1985 paper suggesting central banks should focus more on low inflation than spurring employment.

Rogoff and Reinhart wrote the 2009 book “This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly,” which predicted that the recovery from the financial crisis would be a “protracted affair,” featuring extended declines in asset markets, large contractions in output and employment, and an explosion of government debt -- similar to the aftermath of past financial crises.

Reinhart and Rogoff argued in a 2010 paper that high government debt depresses GDP growth. In emerging-market countries, high debt-to-GDP ratios may also spark inflation, they wrote.
Debt Ratios

In 2013, the professors acknowledged they had inadvertently left some data out of their calculations for the paper, which had been used by some policy makers to justify austerity in the U.S. and Europe, after researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst questioned their methods.

While Reinhart and Rogoff claim the error doesn’t change the thrust of their research, Nobel laureate and Princeton University economist Paul Krugman has said the two are doing little to dispel what he calls a misconception generated by their paper that economies falter when debt levels exceed 90 percent of GDP.

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Op zondag 8 juni 2014 23:09 schreef Individual het volgende:
Ik was net even wat onderzoek aan het doen op hoe lang de wereld nog olie heeft en kwam op een grote belangrijke 'x' uit.. Venezuela.

[ afbeelding ]

Met de betrouwbaarheid van Chavez hoe betrouwbaar is de enorme stijging van de oliereserves?

Het 'internet' is er niet zo zeker over. Mata, wat is jouw opinie hierover?

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Op donderdag 27 november 2014 22:29 schreef Hexagon het volgende:
Vandaag hebben ze een flink probleem erbij na de mislukte poging de olieproductie te verlagen.

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Op zaterdag 17 mei 2014 16:52 schreef primaa het volgende:
Over persvrijheid gesproken: Colombia scoort zelfs slechter dan Venezuela op dit vlak. Het jaarlijke onderzoek 'Freedom of the Press' van Reporters Without Borders plaatst Venezuela op plaats 116 met een score van 35,37 en Colombia op plaats 126 met een score van 36,68.

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As the economy crumbles, so do the institutions holding up the regime.

As birthdays go, it could have been a happier one. Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, celebrated his 52nd on November 23rd with a hand-picked crowd of supporters and public employees in a cramped square in the centre of Caracas. His birthday wish was to live (and presumably to govern) for another 50 years to see “Bolivarian socialism” come to fruition.

In fact, time may be running out for the revolution. The price of Venezuelan oil, source of 96% of Venezuela’s foreign-exchange earnings, has dropped from $99 to $69 a barrel since June. The economy is in a deep recession and inflation is headed for triple-digit rates. Basic goods like flour and cooking oil are in short supply and queues to obtain them are common.

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Op zondag 30 november 2014 23:21 schreef Individual het volgende:
Hoe lang zal het duren voordat het echt breekt?

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Op zondag 30 november 2014 23:36 schreef Digi2 het volgende:

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Nu de inflatie echt uit de hand begint te lopen is er de kans dat men de bolivar niet meer accepteert en de zwarte handel in goederen en $ enorm gaat toenemen. Winkels zullen sluiten omdat ze geen goederen tegen verlies (lees bolivars) gaan verkopen. Het wachten is dus op de voedselbonnen.

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Venezuela’s Oil Industry Exodus Slowing Crude Production

When Angel Fernandez, a former production engineer with Venezuela’s state-owned petroleum company, relocated to Canada’s oil-sands region, it wasn’t for the weather. The draw was a paycheck that he said can stretch as much as 100 times further.

“It’s been very difficult adjusting to temperatures” that typically max out at -10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit), Fernandez said in an interview. “But for the opportunity, it’s worth it.”

Fernandez, 33, is part of a growing exodus of skilled oilfield workers from Venezuela, where real wages for engineers have fallen to the equivalent of less than $400 a month, about 9 percent of the global average. The world’s worst inflation, swelling crime rates and a plunging currency are prompting others to move abroad, dragging down oil production at a time when slumping crude prices threaten the country’s export revenue.

While Venezuela’s foreign affairs ministry has declined to provide emigration data, job websites show surging interest. The number of Venezuelans with active resumes on Rigzone.com, a Houston-based oil and gas research company with an employment database, jumped 22 percent this year through October, and is up 68 percent over 2011. Daily page views on MeQuieroIr.com, which helps Venezuelans looking to emigrate, reached 180,000 to 200,000 in September and October, compared with an average of 60,000 for the past four years.

“This is the highest and most prolonged traffic spike we have experienced since we launched in 2001,” MeQuieroIr.com Director Esther Bermudez said in an e-mailed response to questions. Bermudez worked for seven years in Petroleos de Venezuela SA’s public affairs department in Caracas, before emigrating to Montreal in 2001.
Production Rates

PDVSA is pumping about 8,000 barrels per employee per day, compared to about 26,000 barrels in 2004, according to the trade group Gente del Petroleo. While Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has pledged to double output, few in the industry are confident this goal can be reached.

“It’s clear they don’t have the human capacity to lift output,” said Eddie Ramirez, the group’s director and a former PDVSA employee who has long criticized the government. Production peaked in 2008 at 3.2 million barrels a day, and last year slid by 11,000 barrels to 2.9 million a day. PDVSA declined to comment on turnover rates.

Real wages for engineers in Venezuela with five to six years of experience are less than $400 a month, based on guidelines published by Venezuela’s Engineering College. That’s about 9 percent of the global average of $4,333 a month, according to Hays 2013 Oil & Gas Global Salary Guide. Three years ago, Venezuela’s engineers took home about about 80 percent of the global average.
Sliding Currency

The currency has lost 85 percent on the black market since Maduro took office in April 2013. The inflation rate, at 63 percent, is “destroying wages,” said Jose Bodas, general secretary of the Federal Union of Venezuelan Oil Workers or FUTPV, which represents about 100,000 workers at PDVSA.

“There’s no oil worker in the world that makes as little as you do in Venezuela,” he said.

In neighboring Colombia, engineers make more than four times more, about $1,650 a month. That’s drawing Venezuela’s oil workers across the border. The country issued 4,234 temporary identity cards to Venezuelans in the first half of this year. That’s 6.9 percent more than all of last year and more than double 2012 levels, according to the Foreign Affairs Ministry. Those figures don’t identify specific occupations.

Colombia’s oil engineering council CPIP and its union USO both say the number of Venezuelans entering the industry is increasing, accounting for 70 percent of professional licenses handed out to foreigners.

Winter Temperatures

Fernandez, the former PDVSA engineer, moved last year to Grande Prairie, Alberta, where the temperature in January typically ranges from -10 to -20.9 degrees Celsius. He earns more than $100,000 a year working for Encana Corp. (ECA)

When he left PDVSA, his paycheck was worth about $1,000 a month; that’s at official exchange rates, which almost nobody gets. The real rate, the unofficial, black market exchange rate available to everyday folk, would give him about $38 now.

“The major driver was economic,” he said.

Venezuela’s bolivar fell to a record low of 166 bolivars per dollar on the black market today compared to official rates that range from 6.3 to 50, according to dolartoday.com, a website that tracks the rate on the Colombian border.

For Jesus Castro, 38, crime was another reason to leave behind family and friends in Barquisimeto, western Venezuela, where he worked as a PDVSA electrical maintenance supervisor.

“I didn’t want my children to grow up like caged birds,” he said by telephone from Calgary, where he works as a project manager for utility EnMax Corp. In the past four years, he said he’s seen an influx of Venezuelans. “Friends, family, sometimes people I don’t even know personally call me asking how to fill in forms, get a visa or help to find a job.”
Emigration Wave

The wave of emigration has accelerated this year after Maduro devalued the currency in May, said Ivan Freites, a union official with FUTPV.

“We’ve seen an uptick in departures due to the additional financial pressures on workers created with devaluation,” Freites said in an interview in Caracas. An earlier exodus followed a general strike in 2002 and 2003, and about three-fourths of the estimated 20,000 people who left PDVSA then are now working in countries including Mexico, Argentina and Colombia, or in the Middle East, he said.

Datanalisis polls shows 10 percent of the population is thinking about emigrating in the near future, more than double levels of two years ago, said Luis Vicente Leon, president of the Caracas-based research company.

New Workers

Departures aren’t reflected in PDVSA’s headcount, which rose 6 percent last year to 140,626, according to its 2013 annual report. That’s because people who leave are usually replaced, though often by lesser trained and less experienced people, Freites said.

“My salary, benefits and professional development opportunities are depressing when compared to other Latin America markets,” Gonzalo Guinand, an engineer at one of Venezuela’s largest engineering and construction contractors, whose biggest client is PDVSA, said by telephone from Caracas. “I don’t see a promising future here if the economic and political situations don’t change for the better.”

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Op vrijdag 5 december 2014 05:15 schreef Digi2 het volgende:
Venezuela’s bolivar fell to a record low of 166 bolivars per dollar on the black market today

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Op vrijdag 5 december 2014 05:15 schreef Digi2 het volgende:

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Opnieuw een exodus van arbeiders die werkzaam zijn in de olie-industrie van Venezuela. Het lage salaris, de hoge inflatie, criminaliteit en slechte vooruitzichten zijn er de oorzaak van. Dit betekent dat de olieproduktie van Venezuela niet zal stijgen maar eerder gaat dalen. De gewenste stijging van 3 naar 4 miljoen vaten dit jaar halen ze niet. Produktie blijft ca 3 miljoen vaten. De plannen van de regering de produktie te verhogen naar 6 miljoen vaten in 2019 gaan ze zo nooit halen.

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Op donderdag 11 december 2014 23:36 schreef Digi2 het volgende:

Oil price hits struggling Venezuela

Zou er een burgeroorlog kunnen uitbreken in Venezuela?

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Op donderdag 11 december 2014 23:36 schreef Digi2 het volgende:

Oil price hits struggling Venezuela

Zou er een burgeroorlog kunnen uitbreken in Venezuela?

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Venezuela’s Got $21 Billion. And Owes $21 Billion

Of all the financial barometers highlighting the crisis in Venezuela, this may be the one that unnerves investors the most as oil sinks: The country’s foreign reserves only cover two years of bond payments.

The government and state-run oil company owe $21 billion on overseas bonds by the end of 2016, an amount equal to about 100 percent of reserves. Those figures explain why derivatives traders aren’t only betting that a default is almost certain but that it will most likely happen within a year.

The 48 percent collapse in crude in the past six months stripped President Nicolas Maduro of the one thing -- windfall profits for the country’s No. 1 export -- that was preventing a full-blown crisis. Even before oil started sinking, the OPEC member had depleted 30 percent of its international reserves in the past six years, the result of billions of dollars of capital flight triggered by the socialist push implemented by Maduro’s mentor and predecessor, the late Hugo Chavez.

“These are panic capitulation levels,” Kathryn Rooney Vera, an economist at Bulltick Capital Markets, said in an e-mailed response to questions. “Oil’s continued price decline is ratcheting up risk aversion to exporters, and even more so for an economy already as distorted as that of Venezuela.”
Photographer: Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images

Even before oil started sinking, the OPEC member had depleted 30 percent of its... Read More

The cost to insure Venezuelan debt against non-payment over the next 12 months surged to about 6,928 basis points yesterday in New York, according to CMA data, widening the price gap over five-year protection to a record.

The upfront cost of one-year contracts implies a 65 percent probability of default by December 2015. Swaps prices show a 94 percent chance of non-payment by 2019. Venezuela’s benchmark bonds due 2027 have fallen for seven straight days, reaching 41.22 cents on the dollar as of 12:02 p.m. in New York today, the lowest in 16 years.
Interest Payments

Maduro said Dec. 10 that the government is doing everything it can to boost the price of oil, which he says should be about $100 a barrel. The country advocated unsuccessfully for production cuts at November’s meeting of members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Yesterday, Maduro said the country could export cement to bring more dollars into the country.

The president says the country’s poor grades from ratings companies amount to an “international financial blockade.”

“Venezuela has economic power, it’s solvent, it has the biggest oil reserves in the world,” Maduro said in a Dec. 6 interview on Telesur. “There are countries in Africa suffering from wars, or Ebola for example. Liberia and Sierra Leone, and other countries -- they have better ratings than Venezuela.”
Diamond Reserves

The country’s dollar bonds posted the biggest rally in three weeks last month after Maduro ordered that $4 billion from Chinese loans be added to foreign reserves. Venezuela burned through half of that funding in the past month.

The Central Bank said on Dec. 4 that it would expand its definition of international reserves to include diamonds, other precious stones and foreign currency “commitments.”

The next interest payment on government bonds, due Jan. 13, is for about $70 million. Payments due on debt of the sovereign alone amount to about $22.4 billion over the next five years, surpassing the nation’s current level of reserves. Brazil’s supply of dollars is more than five times the payments it owes on all its foreign bonds, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

At current oil prices, Venezuela will face a funding shortfall of about $25 billion next year, according to Citigroup Inc. estimates. Every $10 drop in Venezuela’s oil basket -- which has plunged about $30 in the past three months -- means a $5.7 billion loss in government revenue, according to the bank’s estimates.
Oil Exports

“Venezuela looks to be just a mess,” Mark Okada, chief investment officer at Highland Capital Management, said yesterday in an interview in New York. Emerging markets in general will suffer in 2015, he said, as “they’re correlated and levered to the commodity cycle in such a meaningful way.”

Venezuela, which has nationalized more than 1,000 companies since Chavez came to power 15 years ago, relies on oil for 95 percent of its export revenue. Chavez died in 2013.

The nation -- which imports 75 percent of its goods -- is plagued by chronic shortages of everything from milk to toilet paper amid the world’s fastest inflation. The economy is expected to shrink 3 percent this year and another 1.5 percent in 2015, according to the median estimate of 15 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.

“It’s striking to me the lengths that Venezuela has gone to preserve dollars for debt service,” Cathy Hepworth, a Newark, New Jersey-based money manager at Prudential Financial, said in an e-mail Dec. 5. “The question is what will Venezuela do when there is no longer an ability to pay.”

For Related News and Information: Venezuela Default Odds at 93% as Bonds Sink to 16-Year Low Venezuelan Diamonds to Join Off-Budget Funds in Raising Reserves Venezuela Burns Through Third of New Chinese Money in a Week Venezuela international reserves Venezuela crude oil basket

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Venezuela, though, does not have a vertical supply curve. That is because the China loan agreements stipulate that when the price of oil falls, Venezuela must ship more oil to China to compensate, leaving fewer barrels available to sell to international markets. In other words, Venezuela has a positively sloped supply curve – a fall in prices is accompanied by a fall in the quantities available to markets.