Quote:
Originally Posted by Red Mile Style
 That was funny!
Technically a coup d'etat and an invasion are different, but the result is basically the same - regime change. If the US was to invade Venezuela, . |
Do you seriously think American paratroopers are going to imminently rain down on Venezuela?
Yes, that is very funny.
As to a coup, I wasn't talking about a coup but, when someone else brought it up, noted that Chavez knows all about them.
As far as I am concerned, oil-economics and regular economics are two completely seperate things. The regularities (supply/demand, invisible hand...) disapear whenever oil is involved. I honestly do not think any country, with the vast supply of oil that Venezuela has, has to worry about their economy. They don't need investment, we're not talking about Ethiopia here, they're self-sufficent. It's not like foreign governments are going to say "Hey, this oil came from Venezuela, let's not pay the market price per barrel." Where's the logic? The only end result would be, that I can see, is Venezuelian (government owned) oil companies making the huge money rather than the typical big oil and the money going back to the people of Venezuela. Ignoring their huge oil reserves and saying their economy will fail is not very realistic.
I chalk your mentality up to NEP flashbacks, which really, is not applicable in this situation
So a Petro-country can ignore the world around it?
That's not usually the case.
One example:
Iran's oil industry has raked in record amounts of cash during three years of high oil prices. But a new U.S. campaign to dry up financing for oil and natural gas development poses a threat to the republic's ability to continue exporting oil over the next two decades, many analysts say.
The campaign comes at a moment of unique vulnerability for Iran's oil industry, which also faces challenges from rising domestic energy consumption, international isolation, a populist spending spree by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and trouble closing contracts with foreign oil companies — a recipe for potential disaster in a nation with one of the world's largest reservoirs of oil.
"If the government does not control the consumption of oil products in Iran … and at the same time, if the projects for increasing the capacity of the oil and protection of the oil wells will not happen, within 10 years, there will not be any oil for export," Mohammed Hadi Nejad-Hosseinian, Iran's deputy oil minister for international affairs, said in a telephone interview.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...home-headlines
Another example is Mexico and its publicly owned oil industry:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...NGAAJN9JG1.DTL
The problem tends to be a drying up of investment capital . . . . the problem of money flowing where its most welcome and avoiding places where it isn't.
Cowperson