“The executive order, signed Friday and made public on Saturday, declared a national emergency to ensure Venezuelan oil revenue held in U.S. Treasury accounts won’t be targeted by lawsuits or creditor claims.
The order says failing to safeguard the revenue, held in Foreign Government Deposit Funds, “will substantially interfere with our critical efforts to ensure economic and political stability in Venezuela.”
…
Several companies have long-standing claims against Venezuela, Reuters reported, noting Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips left Venezuela nearly two decades ago after their assets were nationalized and are both owed billions of dollars.
Trump gathered about a dozen executives from energy companies at the White House on Friday amid his administration’s push to get U.S. oil companies to invest in Venezuela. Trump told the executives that they would be dealing directly with the U.S., rather than the Venezuelan government.
ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance told Trump that his company was still owed $12 billion and that the U.S. government has the chance to restore what’s been lost, according to Reuters.”
“Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powellsaid Sunday the Department of Justice has served the central bank with subpoenas and threatened it with a criminal indictment over his testimony this summer about the Fed’s building renovations.
The move represents an unprecedented escalation in President Donald Trump’s battle with the Fed, an independent agency he has repeatedly attacked for not cutting its key interest rate as quickly as Trump prefers. The subpoena relates to his testimony before the Senate Banking Committee in June, Powell said, regarding the Fed’s $2.5 billion renovation of two office buildings, a project that Trump criticized as excessive.
Powell on Sunday cast off what has up to this point been a restrained approach to Trump’s criticisms and personal insults, which he has mostly ignored. Instead, Powell issued a video statement in which he bluntly characterized the threat of criminal charges as simple “pretexts” to undermine the Fed’s independence when it comes to setting interest rates.
“This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions — or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation,” Powell said.”
“Exxon’s chief executive Darren Woods said: “We have had our assets seized there twice and so you can imagine to re-enter a third time would require some pretty significant changes from what we’ve historically seen and what is currently the state.”
…
Trump signed an executive order that seeks to prohibit US courts from seizing revenue that the US collects from Venezuelan oil and holds in American Treasury accounts.
Any court attempt to access those funds would interfere with US foreign relations and international goodwill, the executive order states.
“Greenland’s party leaders rejected President Trump’s repeated calls for the U.S. to take control of the island, saying that Greenland’s future must be decided by its people.
“We don’t want to be Americans, we don’t want to be Danes, we want to be Greenlanders,” Greenland Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen and four party leaders said in a statement Friday night.
…
Eighty-five percent of Greenlanders say they oppose a takeover by the U.S., the BBC reported. Most also say they favor independence from Denmark, though the Nordic country provides subsidies, military support and more for the autonomous territory.”
While Venezuela has a lot of oil, they don’t produce that much, and it will take a decade to really ramp up their production. The US doesn’t need Venezuelan oil and it’s probably not worth the risk of destabilizing the country just for oil. Cutting off China and Cuba from Venezuelan oil may have more value, but, China can get oil from elsewhere.
“As members of federal law enforcement, ICE officers have the authority to stop, detain and arrest people they believe to be in the country illegally. They need a warrant to arrest someone inside a private home or business. In public spaces, they can make arrests without a warrant, but they must have cause or reasonable suspicion to believe that the person is violating immigration laws.
…
“By the letter of the law, ICE only has the authority to detain, arrest or deport people who are believed to be in the country illegally.
In practice, however, there are many accounts of American citizens being caught up in the administration’s raids. The news site ProPublica identified upward of 170 incidents where citizens were held by immigration authorities, including some who were detained even after showing a legal government ID.
ICE can detain citizens if they allegedly commit a crime, such as interfering with an immigration operation or assaulting officers. ProPublica’s list includes 130 people who were held for alleged infractions, though those cases “often wilted under scrutiny” and very few resulted in convictions.
…
ICE reported that it had conducted 622,000 deportations since the start of Trump’s second term on Jan. 20, 2025. While that’s well short of the goal of 1 million annual deportations the administration had set for itself, it’s still enough to shatter the previous annual record of 316,000 set during Barack Obama’s presidency.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/article/can-ice-agents-detain-us-citizens-what-powers-do-they-have-to-arrest-people-your-most-common-questions-answered-194725171.html
“Cártel de los Soles “is actually a slang term, invented by the Venezuelan media in the 1990s, for officials who are corrupted by drug money.” As Savage explained in November, citing “a range of specialists in Latin American criminal and narcotics issues,” Cártel de los Soles “is not a literal organization” but rather “a figure of speech in Venezuela.”
In 2020, in other words, the Justice Department made a pretty embarrassing mistake, which it has sought to rectify in the revised indictment. Yet the Treasury Department and the State Department are still listing Cártel de los Soles, which federal prosecutors now say refers to “a patronage system” created by a bunch of corrupt government officials, as an FTO, which under federal law means “a foreign organization” that “engages in terrorist activity” threatening “the security of United States nationals or the national security of the United States.””
“Large institutional investors have gone from buying effectively zero single-family homes before the Great Recession to being responsible for a small but non-negligible percentage of home purchasers in recent years.
…
any real federal effort to squeeze institutional investors out of the single-family housing market is bound to make shelter more expensive and less plentiful.
For all the political attention paid to larger institutional investors, they make up a small percentage of home purchasers and own an even smaller share of the country’s single-family homes.
According to The Wall Street Journal’s parsing of the data, investors were responsible for about 25 percent of single-family home purchases in the first quarter of 2024. That is up from 20 percent in 2016, and the increase is almost totally driven by larger investors who own upward of 100 homes.
Over the past few years, companies owning 1,000 or more homes have accounted for only about 1 percent of all single-family purchases, but in 2024, their purchases appear to have dropped to effectively zero.
Purchases by entities that own more than 10 homes have ranged from 2 percent to 6 percent in recent years. That means that the 20 percent or so of homes being bought by investors are predominantly being sold to smaller landlords who own 10 or fewer homes.
And the bulk of home sales (some 75–80 percent) continue to be owner-occupiers.
…
An owner-occupier doesn’t need to argue with a landlord about replacing an old appliance. They don’t need to worry about a tenant not paying rent, damaging the property, or moving and leaving them with a vacancy to fill.
As such, owner-occupiers are willing to pay a higher purchase price for a home. Landlords who do have to absorb all the risks and costs of their business demand a higher offsetting yield from owning a home, says Erdmann, which means demanding a lower purchase price.
…
The only growth in home production to be squeezed is from expanding build-to-rent construction. While politicians are interpreting this activity as homes taken from homeowners, they are, in fact new supply that would go away under any ban on institutional investors.”