Article autoplays video with audio. Just so you know. Incredible that Bloomberg treats their readers so poorly.
[deleted]
Venezuela’s Behind on Its Debt and Facing Two Huge Bond Payments
31–40 of 80 posts
Re: Venezuela’s Behind on Its Debt and Facing Two Huge Bond Payments
#32Article autoplays video with audio. Just so you know. Incredible that Bloomberg treats their readers so poorly.
Off topic, but if you're using Chrome, change chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy to 'Document user activation required'.
Re: Venezuela’s Behind on Its Debt and Facing Two Huge Bond Payments
#33Article autoplays video with audio. Just so you know. Incredible that Bloomberg treats their readers so poorly.
The "Disable HTML5 Autoplay" Chrome plug-in stops this.
Re: Venezuela’s Behind on Its Debt and Facing Two Huge Bond Payments
#34On Friday, the government-run oil giant PDVSA owes $985 million. Maybe an ignorant question... who do they owe... who own's these bonds?
The article names a number of the bond holders. In general terms, almost every hedge fund owns some amount of the $140B in outstanding debt.
Re: Venezuela’s Behind on Its Debt and Facing Two Huge Bond Payments
#35On Friday, the government-run oil giant PDVSA owes $985 million. Maybe an ignorant question... who do they owe... who own's these bonds?
The bonds are traded on the markets, so in theory it could be anybody that can hold bonds and could change at any time.
Re: Venezuela’s Behind on Its Debt and Facing Two Huge Bond Payments
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
As two notable countries of significant interest to HN readers recently proved, frustrated voters are easily led astray by populist demagogues with big promises and low tolerances for truth-telling.
That doesn’t make the manipulated voters any less guilty.
I'm mainly annoyed by the association of Venezuela's disaster with socialism. What the voters "bought" was a populist system; the political underpinnings are almost entirely irrelevant.
Scandinavia is fraught with the socialist devil too, yet manages to get by just fine.
Re: Venezuela’s Behind on Its Debt and Facing Two Huge Bond Payments
#37If you run sovereign debt in a currency you don't control, you become a colony, not a country. Venezuela private firms should all be run through administration to wipe out the creditors and re-floated with Bolivar investment.
What have private firms got to do with this? The debts are owed by the government and the government owned state oil company.
The domestic economy of Venezuela has collapsed due to extreme economic mismanagement, so switching to a local currency won’t help because the economy doesn’t have the local resources to rebuild. That means to rebuild it will need to import modern equipment and engage foreign expertise to rebuild and update infrastructure the country doesn’t have the capability to build itself anymore. Good luck getting the foreign currency needed to do that in a default.
Take the oil industry for example. Venezuela itself doesn’t have the capability to build significant new oil infrastructure or update it. In order to do that they need foreign currency to pay suppliers and contractors. So the only way to keep their oil industry going, on which the whole economy now depends, is using hard currency. They’re not going to socialist paradise their way out of this.
Re: Venezuela’s Behind on Its Debt and Facing Two Huge Bond Payments
#38The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.
Re: Venezuela’s Behind on Its Debt and Facing Two Huge Bond Payments
#39On August 25, 2017, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order limiting the government of Venezuela's ability to access certain types of international financing. This would certainly curtail the governments ability to ease the pressure of bond payments. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/08/25/exec... when you cant sell assets, you cant repay a bond. PDVSA, the nationalized oil asset of the st…
> one becomes immediately suspicious of the US intent in latin america These restrictions are forcing an inevitable outcome sooner. Venezuela's debt load is unsustainable for reasons entirely of Chavez and Maduro's doing (as well as the people who elected them in elections that were, until fairly recently, fair and free [1]). Suspicion is good. Using baseless suspicion to deflect attention from a well-based problem i…
> one becomes immediately suspicious of the US intent.
I suggest your read or watch this and you'll be immediately less suspicious [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit...
Re: Venezuela’s Behind on Its Debt and Facing Two Huge Bond Payments
#40The paradox of Venezuela is a populist government that beasts its chest about foreign imperialism starving its citizens to make bond payments to foreigners. We're beyond the point where a sane democracy would have defaulted. The only conclusion I can come to involves cronies of the administration holding substantial amounts of the debt. The payments aren't on interest and principal, but for patronage.
The bond markets have pretty much been expecting a default for several years but they have continued making payments even though they can't buy food and medicine. It's a very strange policy.