New Year, New Geopolitical Shockwaves | Macro Mondays: January 05, 2026

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0:25Hello out there. Happy New Year and welcome Welcome back to Macro Mondays, our first show of 2026. My name is Mikkel Osvald. I'm going to be your host this year as well. And I'm going to be joined today and throughout the year by you, Andreas Steno. Welcome to the show, Andreas. And Happy New Year. Happy New Year, Mikkel. And well, you know that we're recording live from Scandinavia because I can tell the audience that you're going straight on vacation in a couple of days from now, even though we've just had a couple of weeks vacation, Mikkel. So that's really typically Danish, right? Europe stuff, yeah.

1:01That's how we do it over here. We go on vacations. You can take our islands. We'll get back to that. Andreas, what a start to the new year. It's been really eventful. We've had the arrest of Nicolas Maduro, the actions in Venezuela. We're going to be covering that, the effects on oil markets, and a couple of trade ideas on that. And we are going to be extrapolating a little bit from that to discuss what might be next. because it feels like there's a bloodlust going on in Washington at the moment. Who's next? Who's the next target? We'll get to that. And we're going to talk macro as well. Even though this is a macro event, we're going to talk other macro as well for a little bit.

1:40And obviously, we're going to be taking all your listener questions. So feel free to chip in into the chat, whether you're watching on Real Vision X, YouTube, or wherever you're watching. We'll be sure to grab those. We've already got a few in there. So before we get started, Andreas, I want to do a little bit of advertisement for the crypto gathering that's coming up, the annual Real Vision crypto gathering. It's in Miami Beach. You and I are going, Andreas. Assuming we're allowed to go to the U.S., assuming Denmark is not at war with the U.S., we're going to Miami at least January 22nd to 25th at Miami Beach.

2:15You don't want to miss it. Check out realvision.com for tickets for that. Really much looking forward to that. But we've got a really packed week coming up here at Real Vision. We're back with a bang after the New Year's. We are updating our portfolio. During the holidays, Andreas, we released our big 2026 outlook with our thematics and stock picks for the new year. We're already changing that, of course. Things move that fast, but we're updating that. And there's something new. If you're an alpha subscriber out there to Real Vision, you're going to be getting a little bit of a digest each week of the stuff that we publish on the Pro Chair at Real Vision.

2:50So you can look forward to that. We're going to dip our toes into that tomorrow, I believe, or at least during this week. So that's going to be a lot of fun, Andres, to reach even wider. Also, Andres, before we get to Venezuela and all the other stuff, we just need our usual disclaimer here. It was an eventful 2025. I think 2026 is going to be equally as eventful. We're going to be actionable, come with trade ideas, and they might be... And sometimes it may be good, sometimes it may be shit. There we go, Andreas. Nothing new there. So, Andreas, you want to start with Venezuela? It's the big one.

3:30Affected market heavily today, obviously. Let's start there maybe. Did you see the market reactions today that you were expecting over the weekend? I mean, the oil market is kind of treating this as any other day, right? To begin with. We traded a little lower this morning, European hours, and then now we're up a little bit. I mean, it wasn't really as big of an event for oil as one could have feared, at least initially on Saturday morning when we got the news. So to some extent, we have to accept that this Venezuelan oil story is pretty much a nothing burger for now for a couple of reasons. we're talking about a very outdated infrastructure.

4:19We're talking about an oil production that is currently not by any means firing on all cylinders. So we're talking approximately a million barrels a day. Right now, we're most likely talking about less since this shock effect leads to a decline in oil production. And we also know that the U.S. Navy is currently not allowing any ships in and out from Venezuela. So in that sense, you know, spot speaking, we're probably talking about decline in the oil supply from Venezuela. But over time, there is a scope here. And let me stress over time, because we're talking about, as I mentioned, a very outdated infrastructure.

5:03We're talking about some of the more difficult oil barrels to transform into gasoline, etc. on Earth. So this whole notion that the U.S. just sees the biggest oil reserve on Earth, you need to take that not even with a pinch of salt, but with a truckload of salt, because we're not talking about an oil reserve that is easily coming online from here. We're rather talking about an exercise that will take many years and will take billions after billions in investments to really move the needle on the oil supply. So if anything, we're talking about something that adds flexibility on the top side supply-wise over the course of one, two years, capping oil prices.

5:51But we're not talking about anything that will lead to a landslide in oil prices here, maybe even rather the contrary short term. So Andres, we discussed this over the weekend that the case might instead be some of these companies that are going to help Venezuela do this. This is a little bit speculative because we don't know exactly who's going to be governing Venezuela. We don't know what's going to be the relationship. But Donald Trump told us explicitly that he had been discussing this with oil companies or refineries beforehand. So it seems like there's a plan for U.S. refineries who are used to this type of heavy crude to get in there.

6:30Is that the play here? What do you think, Andreas? And is that already over the day? Because a lot of these companies have seen huge rallies today. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, honestly, in hindsight, some of these companies already saw a rally on Friday. that makes me speculate at least whether someone from within the very inner circle of the administration leaked something so well I don't think this story is over from the perspective of more structural capex we're likely talking about a story that's got legs for another couple of years maybe even three years from now so I think you have plenty of time to join the bandwagon on some of these, jump the bandwagon on some of these names.

7:17You know, just before going on here, we traded a couple of these names in the portfolio. We'll make sure to update all of you as soon as possible. I think it's maybe already out. So the point here is that I see this as a meaningful story also years ahead, while the very, very near-term story is probably already in the price, right? Yeah. Yeah, the thing is, Andres, I've been pondering this a lot today and yesterday because initially I expected this to be sort of an invasion, a regime change. You would tear down the Maduro regime, the narco-terrorist regime replace it with something new. That's not the case.

7:56Maduro is out. His wife is out. Everything else stays the same. The army is still there. The police are still there. The whole power apparatus. and most likely one of Maduro's inner circle guys is going to be the new leader, obviously, as a U.S. puppet, essentially. So this is not a regime change. This is not Iraq or Afghanistan. And this was done so quickly, Andreas, that it sort of never materialized into a true macro story. Obviously, it affects markets today and there are plays for this. But if this had happened on a Tuesday, we would have seen huge fluctuations in oil and equities most likely until we had more clarity.

8:34But everything was over so quickly that now we have at least clarity enough that this is not going to escalate and have wider market repercussions. Do you agree with that? Yeah. For now, that certainly seems to be the logical conclusion here. From a geopolitical perspective, I have to agree with you that we have to accept that this is not a full regime change. It seems like the playbook has changed probably due to the lessons learned in the Middle East over the course of the past couple of decades. So instead of trying to force a democracy into something that hasn't really worked as a democracy for a while, they're probably going to accept that they have a puppet in there for a while.

9:20I think this is an old saying in geopolitics, but it may be a son of a bitch leading the country, but at least it's our son of a bitch, right? And that's kind of the notion that they're following now. I'd like to hear you, Miguel, because the question I've received all day, both from members of Real Vision, but also from our hedge fund clients, is what is next? And I mean, it's obviously highly, wildly speculative whether we get an invasion or whether we get a similar military operation elsewhere. But to me, it really seems like the administration is high on success here. So why not try and do more now that there is a window of opportunity?

10:07Michael, where? Yeah, to me, it seems like they're like teenage boys who just found a porn magazine under the dust drawer. Look at this picture. I have a slide deck here of Lindsey Graham. I don't know if you saw this today. I think it was on Fox. He donned a Make Iran Great Again hat. That tells you where we're at. For us here in Denmark, we can hope that Iran is next and not Greenland, but let's discuss the geopolitics a little bit. Does the USA need the Venezuelan oil? No, but it's better to have it US controlled than Russia or China controlled. This is a big issue for China strategically because they were relying on Venezuela being a source of oil, especially in times of conflict.

10:55However, if it came to an open conflict between the US and China, the US would relatively easily be able to cut off that supply chain. But still, it was a part of the Chinese built supply chain. And that's where I see this. If there are any strategic elements to this, it's about building larger supply chains and controlling these supply chains in the era of decoupling, which is one of our big trading thematics for 2026. So that's also where I see these trades fitting into. It's part of the larger decoupling between the US and China. Getting back to your question, Andreas, what's next? We're having a lot of names floated.

11:27I mean, if the narco-terrorists narrative holds, which I don't really think it does, then Colombia, Mexico should be obvious. That's going to be entirely different cases. I don't think you're going to get away with just flying in and capturing the Colombian president or the Mexican president. I don't think that's going to be possible. It's very clear to me that in Venezuela, you had someone on the inside who, if not participated in this, then at least let it happen. I don't think you're going to have that in Colombia or Venezuela to any degree like that. They're much more complicated countries.

12:02So they're going to be looking at what opportunities do we have because they want to keep this momentum going. Right now, everything is working out for Trump. The Iran attack back in the summer worked out incredibly well. He feels like he's done a great peace deal in Armenia, in Myanmar, etc., in Thailand. So, I mean, if things continue to escalate in Iran, we might see that the U.S. administration tries to, you know, give the regime that final little notch that makes it fall over. Again, it's a whole different beast. Iran is a multicultural country, could devolve into a civil war. We all know where all the refugees are going, but it could be interesting for the U.S.

12:43to try and get rid of the ayatollahs there. And then, Andreas, we have so many questions on this. also because we're Danish and we have to declare that Greenland. That's the easy one. There's no military opposition there. It's very natural. It's in the Western Hemisphere, so it fits with the Don Rowe doctrine. And I have to say, for us, and I think in the Danish mind, this was something that was there, could happen next year, we don't know, which is over the past, over the weekend, switch to this is going to happen. Trump said as much. This is going to happen in a few weeks. in a few weeks we're not going to see a US invasion of Greenland but we're going to see a term sheet essentially presented to the Danish government and then we'll see if there's a deal to be made out of that I'm quite fearful of that because if Trump really wants Greenland to be American what kind of deal can you really make you can give the Americans freedom of military access and they already have that so can the Danish government solve Trump something that he already possesses I don't know maybe So a quick break in your regular programming.

13:50If you're serious about your future, grab my free report called Prepare for 2030. I think you've got five years to make as much money as possible. And this guide will help you navigate what's coming. The link is in the description. Download it now. Do you see any other angles to the Greenland story? Do you see any investment angles to that address? Well, you have a few companies at least exploiting the opportunities within mining to the very south of Greenland. They've already seen inflows both today and on Friday. So, I mean, you have niche stories there. In my opinion, it's a more obvious mining case than Venezuela, especially if you look at rare earths.

14:35We had a lot of discussions ongoing on social media on whether Venezuela was a huge deposit of rare earths, and not least cobalt and antimony. Both were probably hallucinations from a large language model, I have to admit. So some pundits were really tricked by the prompts that they made with some of these big large language models over the weekend. And in any case, I consider it very interesting to watch the price action and commodities just after the market to open here in the US. I'm looking at the screens now. Gold is absolutely through the roof. And I think that makes sense because if the coupling was semi-confirmed on Friday, it is definitely fully confirmed by Monday here.

15:20we're talking about on a trend basis a decoupling that is hard to reverse now between the US and China and the global south will obviously buy gold in response to that the big question is whether silver will follow, for those of you who tracked my you know my writings on X and LinkedIn and Real Vision etc over the course of the Christmas holidays here, you'll know that I've been caught in the crossfire between all of these silver bucks over the course of the past few weeks. I think silver is very sensitive here, first and foremost, due to positioning. We're talking about 20 billion plus longs, in paper longs, that is.

16:09And the CME is raising margins more or less on a bi-daily basis at the moment, meaning that you have to put up more collateral, basically, for your longs in these silver positions. On top of that, it is not as clear to me that silver is a precious metal anymore since the industrial use has been increasing. Not by a lot, but though increasing on a trend basis, meaning that it is less obviously a debasement trade than gold is. So I would personally prefer gold and Bitcoin to silver as decoupling bets on this. We're thankfully also starting to see some pretty solid price action in Bitcoin, say, over the past week or so.

16:55And in any case, what I'm trying to say here is that the decoupling base case is now solidified. It is hard to reverse, meaning that those obvious decoupling bets will continue to rally. and I think there are some you'll find some tremendous opportunity in some of the names that can actually deliver on this question on rare earths one of our top picks there energy fuels has had a tremendous start to the year and I think there is more in store for us in relation to this bet so overall I probably shouldn't say this but I could be more happy with the developments at least from a monetary standpoint.

17:39I mean, we're making money right, left, and center. Because it's basically what we anticipated this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. On a trend basis, yeah. That's what this show is about, Andres. There are plenty of shows in international law and morals and ethics. Will the other guys handle that? Speaking of Bitcoin, Andres, yes, Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, but they also had a Bitcoin reserve of 600 ,000 Bitcoins that has now been either seized or frozen, a little bit unclear by the US government. So obviously the oil reserves, they're hard to move out of Venezuela. These Bitcoins are extremely easy to move.

18:18They're very, very easy to displace. Some of them might find their way into, I don't know, I won't even speculate into that. But that size of a Bitcoin reserve that the US government now holds, five years ago, more or less, five years ago, That would have been a hot potato for most governments now. It's a big asset. Do you think, could this restart the talks of a U.S. federal Bitcoin reserve? Or, I mean, they're not going to flood the markets with them, are they? No, I mean, at least if they follow the playbook that they laid forward last year, we're talking about a strategic reserve that is built up when you see stuff, right?

18:56We're not talking about a reserve that you add to on a running basis by buying. But I mean, if you somehow get hold of some, you'll keep them in that reserve. And that would be my base case here. So I, as you, I saw some of these stories around this Venezuelan Bitcoin reserve. I'm not sure it's fully confirmed the size of it, Michael. But in any case, if it's true that it's worth as much as you mentioned, we're probably talking about something that could either be added to the U.S. strategic reserve or else, you know, the administration will ensure that the new administration in Venezuela will not sell it.

19:36And I guess that holds for the Venezuelan gold reserves as well. Some of those gold reserves are held in London, to my knowledge, meaning that you could obviously also fear that those reserves could be frozen or sold or whatever. But I don't think that will happen, especially not given the stance that we see from this administration on this topic elsewhere. No one. I mean, the Chinese are reportedly owed, I think it was$19 billion in oil. What's going to happen to that? Is the US going to repay them that? No one knows. Those are the big questions. And also, Andreas, what I'm interested about, just to keep the eyes on the geopolitics a little bit.

20:16Okay, we've got Maduro out of the place. We have a new stable government. This is looking much better than Iraq or Afghanistan from a cynical perspective. You probably have a functioning government. The water is running, garbage getting picked up. People are getting arrested for thieving and whatever, traffic violations. A society is running, but this is not a well-functioning society, Andreas. This is a society that's going to run out of money in a couple of months. Then they're going to have to go to Washington and ask the Americans to fill up their state coffers. They can't go to Moscow for that anymore.

20:47They're not going to go to Beijing for that anymore and make those transactions. They're going to go to Washington. And that's going to be the next one. how long and how deep are the U.S. willing to go. They can set up similar arrangements to the Chinese where they loan the Venezuelans money that's going to be repaid in oil or Bitcoin. But there is going to be a bill to pay here. That's all I'm saying. And then we're not even getting into the risks of Venezuelan being discontent with the Maduro government continuing. We'll have to see if that evolves into a macro case address. It's obviously manageable from a size perspective, but there is going to be a bill or a tab to pick up.

21:26Should we just talk a little bit else than Venezuela, Andreas? Yeah, but obviously it's been the biggest story, but I think it's noteworthy that, you know, over the course of the Christmas season, also the first couple of days of the new year here, we're receiving a confirmation of the price data that we also gathered ahead of Christmas. We're talking about a substantial disinflation impulse now in the US. And I think it is even in play that we get relatively close to the 2 % target over the course of the first quarter here. What happens from Q2 and onwards is a bit more debatable, in my opinion.

22:10I mean, we could accelerate from there. The point I'm trying to make here is that amidst this, which is evidently accelerating the debasement case from a geopolitical standpoint, we're likely going to receive a couple of rate cuts, if I'm right, from the Federal Reserve just during this quarter. meaning that you'll also fuel this whole dollar debasement notion via that channel. You'll fuel small caps. You'll fuel risk-taking via the interest rate channel as well because inflation will allow them to cut interest rates. And I think that's a really, really interesting backdrop. It sounds kind of odd to be as bullish as I am here amidst what's going on.

22:53But we're talking about a geopolitical backdrop that typically accelerates these debasement trends while we're seeing inflation decelerating. We're seeing the Federal Reserve cutting. We're seeing slightly weaker dollar on a trend basis. and we're, by the way, in the very early innings of observing the ramifications of this new legislation for banks in the US called the ESLR and we've written extensively about that for the ProTier in our macro subscription package and we're talking about something that will likely provide the banks with plenty of billions of extra lending capacity but not least repo capacity, which has been much needed after a tight quarter turn and year turn in dollar liquidity.

23:50So being on the other side of this tighter dollar liquidity landscape is also positive. So lower inflation, liquidity going up, this geopolitical backdrop, I think we have a very strong return profile ahead of us in January. yeah and supporting the the case for a renewed cutting season is the the ISM print that was just out I think half an hour ago here 47.9 a fair bit lower than the consensus supporting the the weight cut theory any other thoughts on that print I know it's just hot in so I don't know how much time you had to no but I mean if you look at our now costs on everything manufacturing related it wasn't a surprise to us at least this print I know we've been banging the drum on better trends in the manufacturing sector for a while.

24:43What's important here, and this is now my main thesis, is that the big, beautiful bill establishes a window of opportunity for CapEx this year. That window was not there last year. So you can basically write off or use your CapEx from a tax perspective this year as a consequence of the big, beautiful bill. And it allows you to look at these CapEx investment cases with a much more benign set of assumptions when it comes to the IRR, the internal rate of return. So I think that is why we've seen the manufacturing sector holding back last year, because they knew this benign window was upcoming from 1st of Jan.

25:34but obviously we need to see that now. We need to see some orders from the manufacturing sector. We need to see some CapEx and my best guess is that we'll get exactly that because the manufacturing cycle is doing better outside of the US than in the US right now, not least explicitly visible via the massive chip exports from Korea and Taiwan to the US. it is really accelerating at the moment and it seems like January we'll also see an acceleration there semiconductors have been off to a very, very hot start of the year I just want to get past a few listener questions here we already have had a few on the ISM print so we covered that but a bit more to the Venezuelan and geopolitical situation from Peter Wenzel here I'm just going to bring it up here one second here we go Peter is based in Colombia he's following the situation closely I don't see Colombia heading down the same path whatever the accusation from the US and the Colombian president's unpopularity here in Colombia he was still democratically elected which should make a Venezuelan style playbook far less likely and that's an important point here Andres because this was possible in Venezuela because Maduro was he was voted out of office two years ago or a year and a half ago.

27:03He was very, very unpopular. He wasn't democratically legitimate. So obviously the other cases, the next steps we're talking about are going to be much more difficult for the US to carry out. So very important there. I know there, I don't expect a similar action to happen in Bogota anytime soon. A question here from Andre Adro, which is interesting also for you, Andreas, but I'll answer it first. Happy New Year, guys. Given the situation in Venezuela, is there a chance that China interprets this as a green signal to take over Taiwan? And if so, is Intel looking good from a macro point of view?

27:40So, I mean, Andres, I know you have a good story in all the nuclear war scenario. How do you prepare for that? But I mean, if China goes to war over Taiwan, it's most likely major conflict. I think two ways of looking at this. One is there's a blueprint here. If the U.S. can do this to Venezuela, then China can do this to Taiwan. And this is all China needs to do to Taiwan is go in there and replace the leadership. They probably need to replace more than the top leadership. But still, they don't need to occupy Taiwan. They don't need to. They simply need to change the leadership to someone loyal to Beijing.

28:19So for China, this is a blueprint on how you can do it. The U.S. can't really complain too much if they do it. On the other hand, losing Venezuela is a strategic setback for China. So all else being equal, it reduces actually the risk for Taiwan, I would say, in the short term. So, yeah, a bit of both here. I don't think Chinese action over Taiwan is imminent, but it's something to watch. And they're obviously going to hold this to the Americans if that should ever occur. And so I don't think you should make any trades based on the expectancy of a Taiwan war. But any views on that, Andres? You know, for what it's worth, my reading is that an invasion of Taiwan got less likely after the Venezuela special operation, simply due to the fact that in case of a full-on international conflict, Venezuela was sort of an oil lender of last resort to China.