The attack on Venezuela seems to have used a cyber attack to take out the city’s electricity and over 150 aircraft. The US suppressed Venezuelan anti-air capability by suppressing and destroying them. Many military targets were struck, most by relatively small and targeted weapons, and most anti-air assets. There wasn’t an attempt to more broadly destroy Venezuela’s military capabilities. The US may have used new one-way attack drones that are cheaper than missiles.
This US operation represents what is possible, but also required luck. Shoulder fired anti-air rockets were launched, and one helicopter was hit in the leg three time and still managed to land the helicopter on the attack. If those hits hit the helicopter or person a little differently, the operation may have gone differently. The US may have had to send more waves, giving Venezuela more time to respond. Success was not inevitable.
The Maduro regime is not gone. The US took the leader, but the rest of the regime stayed in place.
The attack was not authorized by Congress, and therefore unconstitutional.
“Trump has reportedly homed in on $50 a barrel as the price he’d like to see US oil prices trend toward, alleviating energy costs for US households.
The problem for the US oil industry? That math doesn’t check out.
In the Permian Basin, the largest collection of oil plays in the continental US and the crown jewel of American energy, breakeven prices hover between $62 and $64, according to data from the Dallas Federal Reserve.
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As a wave of global oversupply gluts the oil market, the Energy Information Administration expects that Brent crude (BZ=F) — the international benchmark — will fall toward an average of $55 per barrel within the first quarter of 2026 and remain at that depressed level throughout the year.
WTI prices would almost certainly move in tandem, pegging its value around $51.50.”
“Hours after the Senate voted to advance the war powers resolution rebuking the White House’s current and future actions in Venezuela, President Donald Trump placed “angry” calls to each of the five Republicans who crossed the aisle, according to people with knowledge of the calls.
Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo.; Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska; Rand Paul, R-Ky.; Susan Collins, R-Maine; and Todd Young, R-Ind., voted with Democrats to require the administration to get congressional approval for future military action in Venezuela.
Thursday’s vote was a procedural motion, and it advances the legislation to a full Senate vote that will require a simple majority.
Soon after the vote, Trump threatened each senator with primary challenges, vowing to unseat them, the people said.”
The first action in Venezuela already required Congressional authorization and was unconstitutional!
“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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
“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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”