What Maduro’s Ouster Means for the Global Economy

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1:14All investing is subject to risk. Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distributor. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. Major breaking news. News that could shape the year, maybe even the century. Early Saturday morning, President Trump announced that the United States had successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela. After months of buildup at 2.01 a.m. local time today in Caracas, Venezuela, U.S. Delta forces slipped into the home of dictator Nicolas Maduro. Within hours, President Trump took to the podium where he made another announcement that stunned onlookers. We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.

2:01The administration's decision to strike Venezuela and capture Maduro follows months of strikes on boats suspected of smuggling drugs out of the country and a full blockade on sanctioned tankers pulling oil out of the country. But the announcement that the U.S. would run Venezuela and safeguard its vast oil reserves came as a surprise. Mr. President, Mr. President, Mr. President. You said that the U.S. is going to run Venezuela, so who's in power right now? Well, we're going to be running it with a group. In the meantime, the current regime in Venezuela, minus Nicolas Maduro, is working with the U.S.

2:35government. They're on state TV constantly. They are, you know, sort of maintaining the message to the local press that they have full control. Creighton Harrison oversees Bloomberg's Latin America coverage. Delce Rodriguez is the vice president of Venezuela and a very close loyalist to Nicolas Maduro. So she's sort of one of the key people of this moment, along with people like Marco Rubio and Donald Trump, in determining what happens next in Venezuela. You know, if you wanted to, you know, express joy at the end of the Maduro regime, you're not really in a position to do that yet. But the risk of a power vacuum is a problem for everybody involved.

3:19We certainly know that a lot of Venezuelan neighbors are watching this very closely with that same concern, right? They're worried about potential for chaos, even if it so far has not happened yet.

3:38I'm Nathan Hager, and this is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. Today on the show, Maduro is out of power in Venezuela. What comes next, geopolitically and economically, for the country, the region, and the rest of the world?

3:57The U.S. strike in Venezuela wasn't unexpected. It followed weeks of strikes on boats, seizures of oil tankers, a major U.S. military buildup, and Trump openly saying land strikes could come next. I asked Bloomberg's Latin America regional editor about what we know so far about the U.S.'s goals in Venezuela. That is the big question. And I think, you know, there have been several rationales presented. Let's put it that way. But the one that was most prominent in Trump's remarks on Saturday were about oil. We're going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.

4:47So that sounds like if you just take his own words, like that's a pretty big part of the priority list. What does not sound like a big priority at this point, and I don't think the word was mentioned even once, is democracy. Do we have a sense so far about what the U.S. running Venezuela is going to look like at this point? It's very hazy. And, you know, Marco Rubio was on a couple of the Sunday talk shows and noted that the U.S. does not have boots on the ground. There's no presence of U.S. military in Venezuela right now. There has been no diplomatic presence from the U.S. in Venezuela in many years.

5:30The United States will retain multiple levers of leverage to ensure that our interests are protected. And that includes the oil quarantine that's in place, among other things. So it's very hard to run a country if you're not there. What they appear to be doing is waiting to see how the first few days play out with Delcey Rodriguez in charge and to see if she's as cooperative as they think she is. And if she's not, then, as Rubio said on Sunday, she may face consequences. Of course, we heard Secretary Rubio talk about the oil blockade being leverage for the U.S. How could that play out over the next coming weeks and months?

6:12So first off, there is one oil major there in Venezuela right now. Chevron has a partnership with Petrolias de Venezuela, PeraVeza as it's known, the state oil company, and continues to operate there and export oil from Venezuela. But you're right. Other than that, there's no U.S. oil majors there. And the question is, would they want to go? A lot is going to depend, as it always does, on money. Because getting new operations started up in a country with a lot of uncertainty, with some poor infrastructure, and with oil that's very thick and heavy crude, that's not so easy to transport, that needs to be diluted just to get it through a pipeline, it ends up being very expensive.

7:02And, you know, Trump talked a lot about the production of this oil sort of paying for itself in a way, right, that this would pay for any investment that the U.S. or the oil companies had to put into it. But it's unclear if he's going to need to incentivize them in some way or, you know, how exactly this is going to work. Given all this, do we have any sense about when we might see the U.S. lift sanctions on Venezuela and what that could mean, not just for the Venezuelan economy, but for global oil flows? It sounds like the Trump administration, from everything Rubio said, Trump has said, they're not in any hurry to change some of the disincentives that they have in place in Venezuela.

7:48They're very much interested in holding as many cards as they can and making sure that they have cooperation from the government in Venezuela before they start making changes to loosen things up. That raises the question about whether there could be any front runners or surprises from the administration when it comes to the kind of Venezuelan leader that they could be able to work with. I guess Delce Rodriguez is still a pretty open question, but are we hearing about any other potential leaders who could step in and work with the Trump administration in Venezuela? No, we're really not. The question is long term, right?

8:25Do they want to encourage and move to a more democratically run Venezuela? But right now, there's no name that's being floated out there as the next in line. We heard from President Trump over the weekend that he doesn't think that opposition leader Maria Karina Machado has a level of support among the Venezuelan people. Is that the sense that we have, that she might not have that kind of level of support that the ruling party has in Venezuela? Well, remember that Maria Corina Machado, of course, she did not run herself in the election in 2024, but she had a surrogate candidate in her place, Edmundo Gonzalez.

9:08And by all international observer accounts, he won handily in 2024. So we know she has a certain level of popularity, or at least did in 2024 when she campaigned very openly for change in Venezuela. So it is possible that that popularity has slipped a little bit, let's say. There's a lot that's happened since the middle of 2024. And she got a lot of people's hopes up and then was unable because of the Maduro regime to see through the promise of democracy that she sort of represented. But it remains true that she's a very compelling figure. The Trump administration's calculation here may be that, you know, we talked to some people who share this view that it's better to ease in a transition with the current institutions in power rather than try to place someone in the middle of it and risk, you know, dissent in the ranks with the military and other parts of the government by just popping someone on top who sort of doesn't see eye to eye with them to begin with.

10:15So there may be some cold logic to this. But Trump's remarks that Machado didn't have respect do hit pretty hard. And we talked to some people close to her and in her camp who were really taken aback and saddened by those comments. What the U.S. action in Venezuela means for its neighbors in the region and for other global power players and how this could impact the global economy. That's next.

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12:42The U.S. mission to remove Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela and transport him to face criminal charges in New York sent shockwaves around the world. I asked Bloomberg's executive editor in Latin America, Creighton Harrison, about the message this may send to other countries in the regions with leftist leaders like Colombia and Cuba. Trump, you know, Colombia, he has accused Gustavo Petro, the president there, of supporting or at least looking the other way at drug production there, cocaine production, which is which which has grown by by any measure under his presidency. So some some vague threats there.

13:20Cuba is in a very difficult situation right now. economically. It's already had declines in some key industries like agriculture and tourism, and it depends very heavily on Venezuela for oil. It's an island, right? And it only has so many ways to power its economy. So it has depended for many years on a kind of barter with Venezuela in which it accepts oil in exchange for services. So that barter system is now presumably under threat at the very least. And if the U.S. were to stop oil shipments to Cuba from Venezuela, it would have a pretty drastic consequence for the Cuban economy because Cuba doesn't really have a lot of other sources of oil at the moment.

14:12And just thinking about this beyond the Western Hemisphere as well, if your Chinese president, Xi Jinping, Russian president Vladimir Putin, Iran's president Pazeshkin, all these leaders who've had their own regional conflicts that the Trump administration has come out pretty hard against. How are you thinking about this? I think there's sort of two minds of looking at this. On the one hand, you know, Venezuela's allies in China, Russia, Iran are in that group very publicly would look at U.S. intervention there as a bad thing. Right. Obviously, they don't want to see an ally get their president captured by any stretch.

14:55But on the other hand, at least a couple of those countries, Russia and China, have designs on other territory, right? In the case of Russia, the international community almost unanimously at the time rejected the war on Ukraine. The Chinese Taiwan situation continues to be a source of great intrigue around the world. You know, our colleagues in Asia had a story yesterday about people being very active on social media in China over the weekend saying, hey, this provides a template for us in Taiwan. And this intervention in Venezuela, does this look to you like a shift in geopolitical strategy for President Trump?

15:39And if so, what do we know about what may have motivated that? Well, President Trump has talked about the Monroe Doctrine quite a bit, right? That's Monroe Doctrine, you know, dates back to the 19th century. And there's this idea that, I mean, depends how you define it, but loosely based that the U.S. has to protect its sphere of influence in Latin America and has it reserves the right to play a role in politics in those places and sort of defend them militarily and treat them as America's backyard, which is a very controversial term here in Latin America. And Trump even made reference to it of this idea that it's now the Don Roe Doctrine, that Donald Trump has made his own corollaries to this.

16:24So, you know, if you think about Venezuela as a source of oil and minerals and other things, this fits neatly into that worldview. It also is consistent with other things Donald Trump has talked about, like Greenland and the Panama Canal. So, you know, those those things could come up again in the coming weeks as people sort of turn their attention to what he's trying to do. So we're taping this around three o 'clock in the afternoon, East Coast time on Sunday. There's a lot that remains to be seen about what's going to happen in Venezuela. So, Creighton, what are some of the biggest hurdles you're going to be looking out for in the near term?

17:01What are you going to be watching for next? I think the key is how Delcey Rodriguez plays the balance between pleasing the Trump administration and showing that she's the right partner for them and keeping the Chavista government in Venezuela in line, including all of Maduro's top lieutenants and loyalists. That seems like a really, really hard job. And so what she says publicly and who she talks to behind the scenes are going to be really key for us to watch. And I think will tell us a lot about the trajectory of things in the coming weeks and months, including what happens with oil, what happens with Venezuela's finances, what happens with the blockade, etc.

17:56This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Nathan Hager. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg.com, subscribe today at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. If you liked this episode, make sure to follow and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.

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