US-Venezuela Policy, Farming Without Subsidies, Robotaxis, Mount Everest Exclusivity

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1:35This is Wall Street Week. I'm David Weston bringing you stories of capitalism. Americans are complaining about high food prices, and that's after all those federal subsidies for farmers. We go to New Zealand to look at supporting farmers a different way. Plus, Elon Musk has been promising us robo-taxis for years now. Is 2026 truly going to be the year they arrive? What will they look like and how will they make money? And climbing the highest peak in the world for fun and for profit. We bring you the story of the business of Mount Everest. But we begin with the dramatic developments in Venezuela last weekend.

2:18When the United States sent its military in to seize President Maduro and his wife. Transporting them to New York to stand trial on criminal charges. Richard Haas has spent his career in and out of government advising on foreign policy. He is senior counselor at Centerview Partners, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, and author of the Substack newsletter, Home and Away. When there's so much uncertainty, it's helpful to know where you're headed. What is the goal of the United States government right now as far as you can discern it? It is not regime change. It is not democracy or human rights.

2:55I think the goal of the United States at a minimum is the access for American companies, American oil companies, to Venezuela's oil sector, which is large but not quite as large as the statistics lead people to believe. Yes, you've got 17%, 18 % of the world's supply, but a lot of it's hard to get to. A lot of it's not the greatest quality crude. It's in terrible disrepair. But anyhow, I think that's priority number one. Whether there are other priorities, for example, to stop Venezuelan support of Cuba, even though as much or more comes from Mexico, but there's that. Whether to wean Venezuela from Russia, China, and others, obviously to keep them out of the drug trade.

3:39So I think there may be secondary or subsidiary objectives, but the principal objective, and the president talked about it, what, 15, 20 times at the Saturday press conference last week, was the oil, the oil access. Yes. When you were in the State Department with Secretary Powell, you were head of, as you say, policy planning, not policy prediction. So it's hard to predict what's going to happen. But in order to plan, you have to think about a range. What's the range of possibilities right now in Venezuela? What's the best it can be? What's the worst it can be? The best it could be is what we just described actually holds, that you have a situation there where you have more continuity than change.

4:17And the United States does not have to get more involved, more intrusive with boots underground or anything like that. There's not massive violence. And we develop a growing economic relationship. The bad news with that is you obviously don't have a democracy or particularly your rights. The average Venezuelan person might be slightly better off, but it's much more continuity than change. The bad scenarios are things unravel, essentially conditions of instability. It may not be as, you know, you had chaos in Iraq within a year. So I'm not predicting chaos, but you asked me for the menu. At the other end of the menu is a real breakdown of order that rival groups essentially start to slug it out.

5:00Now we hear, it's a little unclear, the United States is sort of going to take some of the oil, a fair amount of the oil, sell it, put it into account, and then maybe give some back to the Venezuelans, sort of like an allowance. How is that going to work? Well, I think one of the interesting parts of that, because yeah, I've read the same stuff, is what's the, how do you put it, what's the sharing arrangement, David? How rich is this allowance? And this is exactly the sort of thing at some point. Nationalism hasn't disappeared in the world. Nationalism is a really powerful force. So at some point, the people challenge the Venezuelan government saying, hey, why are we giving this generous or sweetheart deal to the Americans?

5:41Why are we not keeping this year. That's exactly the dynamic, by the way, that decades ago led to all the nationalizations, not just in Venezuela, but around the world. Deals with outsiders, with the international oil companies were seen as way too generous to them. And countries basically said, hey, this is our sovereign wealth. Why are we giving so much of it away? So the idea that that argument would not surface sooner rather than later, I kind of think it will. What are the likely consequences beyond Venezuela. Start with Latin America, for example. Certainly Colombia's come to people on the president's mind, as well as Cuba, maybe Mexico.

6:18All of the above. And there's Canada and others. And then we get a little bit farther afield to Greenland. I think Cuba is probably the one that most worried because it's not doing well. It's not a failed state only because of external support. So they're going to have to probably find some substitutes. They've got Mexico. I don't know what Russia would be prepared to do. I think they're probably the most nervous. The president has attacked the president of Colombia, which is too bad in some ways because Colombia was one of the great success stories of American foreign policy. People often criticize versions of nation building.

6:51Well, we kind of got inside Colombia and it wasn't a change of regime. But with the existing regime, we helped them deal with their civil war. We helped them deal with the drug issues. Mexico is a funny issue because it's not where the government is part of the problem except they're indirectly part of it because they're either unable or unwilling or both to deal with the cartels. They're not meeting their sovereign obligation to make sure that their territory isn't used as a drug production and traffic thing. So the question there is what might at some point we do about it. There's been periodic threats that we would use military force against the cartels.

7:28I think Canada is more just a scratchy relationship. I don't sense any enthusiasm, shall we say, for it to become a 51st state. Ironically enough, Venezuela is slightly closer to becoming the 51st state right now in a de facto way than is Canada. And I think the other big question mark is Greenland farther afield geographically. But there's been so many pronouncements by the administration, both from a strategic argument as well as from a resources argument, that I actually take this seriously as a possibility. Though what's baffling to me, and here I am an old-fashioned diplomat, if the United States wanted a more intimate, strategic, and economic relationship with Greenland, I think it's there for the offing.

8:12That's why God invented diplomats. You send somebody there, you negotiate the terms of it, you make it generous to them because it's important to them. How it's been allowed to come to this, I truly don't understand, David. Greenland is another territory, not country, but territory in its own right. It is under the protection of Denmark. Yes, sir. The sovereignty is with Denmark. You said to me when the national security strategy first came out, wow, look at this because of the Monroe Doctrine. Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, even Canada, you could say that's Western Hemisphere. Greenland's not, last time I checked.

8:47And it is theoretically subject to NATO protections. 100%. So you're right. It's kind of what it reflects is not the Western Hemisphere focus of this administration, which Venezuela can be explained by. It's more the commercial and economic focus of this administration. And that's where I think it makes sense. And this administration essentially sees foreign policy more in terms of homeland security and economic welfare. So they're worried about drugs. They're worried about immigration. And they're into the business of promoting business. And I think Greenland falls a little bit into all that, but it also shows something else, a lack of concern, I don't have a word for it, David, for Europe.

9:31I mean, the two great theaters of history for the last 100 plus years are Europe and Asia. And this is an administration that's dialing a lot of its attention towards this part of the world. If you connect the dots, it looks like we're moving towards a world, what you might call of spheres of influence, where the United States is preoccupied here. Russia and Europe literally slug it out in their part of the world. We'll see. China has something of a free hand in its part of the world. And we've gone voluntarily, which is the strangest part of this to me, as someone who studies history, from being a truly global power to being something more of a regional power.

10:07The United States is pulling back from Europe, as you put it, at a time when Europe could be seen as being under contest from Russia and what's going on in Ukraine. President Putin must be watching this. What does the Venezuelan development say to President Putin? Whatever narrow setback he's experienced in Venezuela because of the Russian connection, whatever humiliation he might feel there, I think is offset. He's got to like the larger thing here. He's got to like the fact that we're demonstrating that great powers have the right to act with a pretty free hand against leaders they believe are illegitimate.

10:41He listens to that and he goes, where have I heard that before? He's got to like the fact that this separates us even more from the Europeans. He's got to like the fact that the United States is more preoccupied with the Western Hemisphere. So I think for Vladimir Putin, this is all good. One of the implications, by the way, since you raised it, David, this has, though, for this negotiation about Ukraine ending the war, which I think the chances of which are remote, I think they've become more remote. Just think about it. If you're President Zelensky, American security assurances in the current context, hard to imagine you would place your country's fate in America's word that we would be there for them.

11:21I think you're going to want a lot more than that if you're President Zelensky. And whatever he's going to require is going to be way too much for Vladimir Putin to accept. So I'm afraid we're about to mark the end of four years of this phase of the war. my unhappy prediction is we're about to go well into year five. Up next, bailing out America's farmers. Why are we looking at another round of subsidies? And is there a better way?

11:56This is a story about thinking the unthinkable. Last month, President Trump proposed another$12 billion in federal aid for farmers hit hard by low crop prices and by the fallout of his trade policies. I'm delighted to announce this afternoon that the United States will be taking a small portion of the hundreds of billions of dollars we receive in tariffs. And we're going to be giving and providing it to the farmers in economic assistance. It's become almost impossible to think of U.S. farming without government payments supporting it. And the U.S. is far from the only country that intervenes in agricultural markets.

12:37But it turns out that there is one country, New Zealand, that has gone a very different way with some unexpected results. The government wiped those subsidies in one year. And the net result of that has been staggering. America started down its path to paying its farmers back in 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression, when President Roosevelt announced the Agriculture Adjustment Act. With the whole world in turmoil, even the united efforts of the farmers themselves would not have been sufficient without the cooperation of the government of the United States. In a recent report covering 54 countries, the OECD found that, quote, quote, agriculture support policies generated on average$842 billion per year in transfers towards agriculture between 2022 and 2024.

13:34Dan Glickman was secretary of agriculture during the Clinton administration. Well, first of all, there's a huge amount of agriculture subsidies in the United States. I mean, it's billions and billions of dollars. I think that farm, first of all, farm programs are complicated and nobody understands them except people in farm countries. So, you know, you have people who have to deal with them all the time are largely the only ones that have been involved in the writing of them. But look, farming is a precarious, tough business. These people have to deal with drought, disease, floods, tariffs, geopolitical issues.

14:09To a soybean grower, China was kind of the salvation. We were exporting, you know, millions and millions of tons of soybeans to China. and when the president announced his tariffs, they were kind of off again, on again. But the impact of that was for the Chinese to kind of cut us off and go to Brazil and Argentina. And it just created a lost market for America, and it was hard to make that up. And that instability that occurred as a result of that meant that a lot of grain elevators were full and the grain couldn't be sold or the uncertainty of production in the next year or two. So it was really, you talk about a dagger in the heart of American agriculture.

14:47Yet across America and around the world, businesses in all sectors are forced to adapt to changing macroeconomic conditions without the promise of government assistance should things go south. What makes farming different? In the Depression era, national food security was critical. But America now produces far more food than it consumes. There was a time that we thought that free markets helped discipline. conduct in all sorts of places. Is there a risk with farm subsidies basically becoming less efficient in farming? That is a very good question. There's no question that farm subsidies kind of skew the economics, the market economics of agriculture.

15:29After all, if we're supporting a crop with government subsidies, then no longer is the market alone determining the price or location or what you produce. And that is a problem. And also it skews the differences between the commodities. You may be supporting corn more than soybeans or wheat more than corn or those kinds of things. And so that does create inefficiencies within the marketplace. On the other hand, we will probably never get rid of farm subsidies. But what if America or any country around the world did get rid of farm subsidies? It turns out that there is one such country. In the early 1980s, New Zealand's economy was in trouble.

16:12Its main export market, Great Britain, had just joined what would later be called the European Union. And public spending was at an unsustainable level. We were within months of being bankrupt. Lockwood Smith is a farmer himself and a former agriculture minister in New Zealand. In 1984, he'd just been elected to Parliament for the first time. By the early 1980s, the level of support across our three main livestock industries, if you like, dairy, beef production, and sheep meat or lamb, the average producer subsidy equivalent across all those industries got up to 30%. But it differed among the industries.

16:53For beef and dairy, it was only about 13%, less than 20. But for lamb, the producer subsidy equivalent got up to 90%. Basically 90 % of the revenue coming into sheep farmers' pockets was from subsidies of various kinds. And of course they responded to that because they got more subsidy if they had more sheep. And our sheep numbers climbed progressively up to 70 million. By 1984 we had 70 million sheep. And we couldn't export all the product of those 70 million sheep. We ended up turning thousands of frozen sheep carcasses into fertilizer because we couldn't, you know, we didn't have the markets to export that stuff.

17:40And so the economy was in crisis, saw the writing on the wall. I mean, we were within months of bankruptcy, if you like. And in 1985, they decided action had to be taken and they abolished. In one year, they abolished all those subsidies. They wiped many of the tariffs protecting other industries. They abolished all of the subsidies for agriculture, wiped them in one year. I wouldn't recommend that anyone else should try to do that, but that's what happened here. The immediate aftermath was tough, and some farms went out of business. Probably the biggest protests I've ever seen on the front steps of the New Zealand Parliament were that year in 1995.

18:20I remember the newspaper headlines, you know, the roar from the hills as farmers, you know, gathered on the steps of Parliament and all the surrounding streets protesting against the removal of those subsidies. Peter Jex Blake is a retired farmer on New Zealand's east coast. He's since handed his farm off to his daughter, but remembers it all too well. Yeah, I remember I was part of a protest group that the Prime Minister David Long and a few ministers arrived at Gisborne Airport one day and a whole of us went out there with placards and started banging on his car, windscreen, because he wasn't having a bar of talking to us.

19:00So we went to every intersection. And he was stopping and waving our placards and, you know, saying, well, holding up our bank statements, showing, well, you know, 18, 20 % interest rates is impossible. He just, or he said, well, change banks. I mean, they had no sympathy at all for farmers.

19:21I was probably too young through the 80s. I was only a baby. So no, I couldn't remember any of the hard times, but I always remember, even right through, mum and dad always trying to save money in every way and never overspend. The immediate aftermath was tough. Although farmers did agree that there was a need for subsidy reform, they felt it was too swift and that they were unfairly targeted. What happened is they sort of took the subsidies off before they did any other economic reform. So farmers wore the brunt of it for a few years. Basically, your income halved, land prices halved, interest rates went through the roof, inflation was trucking along 15-16%.

20:10So because none of the other parts of the economy had been reformed, yeah, pretty tough going. fertiliser use dropped in half. So I basically just toughed it out. Everybody of my generation were living on a smell of an oily rag. Yeah, it took from the time from 1984, which is when the s*** really hit the fan, it was 10 years really of not making much progress at all. You were able to gradually do some improvements, but things didn't really turn the corner until the mid-1990s. But things did eventually turn a corner. The result has been quite stunning actually. It was hard initially, but the improvement in productivity since then has been stunning.

20:59Because you either changed what you're doing or you did lose your farm, you went out of business. And so they started introducing new genetics into our sheep flock. Because the sheep industry was affected the most because it had the highest level of subsidies. They brought in new breeds of sheep like finished landrace and a breed developed in New Zealand Perrindales to improve the fecundity or the number of lambs that a ewe had from being just one lamb to two and more. Today we have more than 150 % lambing percentages compared with less than 100 % back then. They introduced new terminal sires to improve the growth rate of the lambs being born in the flock.

21:41They improved our pasture management practices so we got better utilisation of our pastures. Because in New Zealand here of course all our livestock farming is conducted outside, just out in the natural environment, just grazing pasture. And the net result of that has been staggering. Today our sheep numbers have come down from 70 million in 1984 to less than 26 million today. Yet the amount of lamb or sheep meat that we produce is pretty similar, not much less than we used to produce when we had 70 million sheep. And it's quite a stunning story. The productivity improvement in our sheep industry has been since 1990 when the things settled down after the changes.

22:25Productivity improvement has been 170 percent, which is, if any, if every other industry in New Zealand had done that, we'd be a wealthy country. Agriculture is still a major part of New Zealand's economy, accounting for around 70 % of goods exports. But it remains largely unsubsidized, and its farmers wouldn't have it any other way. We're not getting any assistance from other than what we generate on farm to mitigate emissions, etc. Everything we do is a plus for the environment. And in fact, you put fertilizer, you build up the organic matter in the land. Pretty cool when you see other farming systems around the world how it relies on grain and subsidies.

23:09So could the New Zealand model be applied elsewhere? We spoke with farmers in Iowa last summer about the role of subsidies in their work. Biggest thing, I guess, for me as a farmer, is I want to make sure we have markets. I don't want direct payments. I would rather not have direct payments from the government. If we can have markets that will buy the grain and stuff from us, not have to depend on the government for it and develop those markets. We don't want to rely on government payments. That's the last thing that we want to do. We've worked to try to eliminate that, and we want to try to create demand through domestic markets, through exports, to offset that.

23:51It's easy to think about a world where farmers don't rely on direct payments from the government, where we create products for the market instead of creating markets for the products, where we encourage innovation through competition. Dan Glickman says that what might be thinkable as a matter of economics may well be unthinkable as a matter of politics. Every senator has large amounts of farm country and farm products and farmers, and they're a huge part of their constituency, and they have equal power. has equal power to the senator in California. That's the dominant factor. Then you have other factors like the fact that Iowa has been the first caucus in the country historically.

24:36That's changing. But Iowa is, people go there and they talk about corn. Even Bernie Sanders talks about corn subsidies and doesn't really rail against them. And it doesn't matter what political party you're in, Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, for the most part, everybody is kind of talks about markets working, but it looks like we're going to have subsidies of some sort forever. Coming up, self-driving taxis. Elon Musk promised they'd be here five years ago. Are they finally going to arrive this year?

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26:24This is a story about over-promising and under-delivering. We've heard about robo-taxis coming our way for five years now, and they're always just around the corner. But are they really coming? And when will they get here? Our colleague Ed Ludlow tells us the tale.