Ricardo Hausmann Explains How the Venezuelan Economy Collapsed
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 9 February 2026
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ricardo Hausmann is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the director of Harvard's Growth Lab. We've talked to him multiple times in the past about the necessary preconditions for economies to grow and thrive. But in addition to his academic work, Hausmann was previously a policymaker in Venezuela, including a stint at the country's central bank prior to the election of Hugo Chavez. In this conversation, we talk about how Venezuela went from being the largest oil exporter in the world (even larger than Saudi Arabia for a time) to becoming the ultimate economic basket case. We also talk about the huge challenge the country will face in reinvigorating its economy, and why he believes that will be impossible as long as the remnants of the Maduro government remain in charge.
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Transcript
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| 0:34.0 | Music Podcasts Radio News Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. |
| 0:35.5 | I'm Joe Wisenthall. |
| 0:36.7 | And I'm Tracy Allaway. |
| 0:40.2 | So Tracy, we recently published that episode about what it was like to have done business during the Maduro years in Venezuela. That was from |
| 0:45.8 | a grain perspective. And I think one thing that's very obvious is that sure, Venezuela may have |
| 0:53.0 | plenty of natural resources, oil, obviously, but also other ones. |
| 0:58.3 | And perhaps that the relationship between the U.S. and the current government may be better than it was. |
| 1:05.0 | But there is going to be, you know, actually reviving the economy, actually getting in a place of stability and thriving, that's a very long way off to say the least. |
| 1:14.1 | Right. So if you have oil in the ground, that's great. But it's in the ground and you need to actually extract it in order to make money. |
| 1:22.9 | And also in order to encourage the type of people who would extract it, you need to have some sort of reliability in place, right? |
| 1:31.8 | There has to be some sense of stability of the future. |
| 1:35.9 | Otherwise, as we heard from our previous discussion, people just aren't going to want to go there and do business. |
| 1:41.8 | Right. So one of the points that he brought up, |
| 1:44.6 | which I think is very germane to the future and the questions about the country's future, |
| 1:49.3 | is that, you know, it talked about if there was a talented engineer who worked in some sort |
| 1:55.1 | of processing plant, in his case he was talking about Cargill, obviously, if there was someone |
| 1:59.3 | who was, like, talented in the sort of technical side of them that hired them in Mexico, you know, they hired them |
| 2:04.4 | elsewhere. So many people left. And when you think about the security situation on the ground, |
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