Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big-picture power shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys? It is Monday, January 5th, and today we are talking about what the whole situation in Venezuela means for markets. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.L.Y slash breakdown pod.

Well, friends, the Trump administration made it all of a couple days into the new year before

triggering the next geopolitical shock. Early on Saturday morning, Venezuelan President

Nicholas Maduro was captured by Delta Force and CIA operatives. He has been extracted back to

New York to face criminal charges related to narco-terrorism.

Now, while the removal of foreign dictators is not an uncommon event in U.S. history,

there are a few very peculiar details about this event.

The first is it wouldn't necessarily be exactly accurate to say that the Maduro regime has been toppled as would typically be the outcome of this kind of operation, in that

the Venezuelan Supreme Court has already sworn in Vice President Delci Rodriguez to continue governing in his wake. At the same time, President Trump has made it clear that Rodriguez serves at his pleasure. Early in the weekend, Trump said that the U.S. will run Venezuela until a safe, proper and judicious transition can be ensured. On Sunday, Trump said he wouldn't rule out a second strike if the Venezuelan government refuses to cooperate. He said Rodriguez could suffer a fate worse than Maduro, quote, if she doesn't do what's right. There's also the very strange visuals of Maduro once he landed in New York. We got multiple photos of him posting with DEA officers giving the double thumbs up. U.S. operatives don't appear to have laid a finger on him as he has no visible signs of injury. Contrast that to pictures of a bloodied Manuel Noriega after his arrest during the Panama invasion of 1989, or the images of Saddam Hussein or Gaddafi after they were thrown. Kimchri Premium remarked on the photos commenting, for a guy who was toppled and stripped of power overnight, Maduro appears remarkably

upbeat, positively radiant, in fact. Almost as if this was less a dramatic downfall and more a well-compensated

retirement package quietly coming together. That sentiment would align with some reports that Trump

and Maduro had been in frequent contact over the past few months, leading some to speculate that

perhaps they could have been negotiating a transition of power. A final curious note about the event is how upfront the White House has been about their motivations. During the Iraq War, for example, the operation was presented to the public as having to do with weapons of mass destruction and a response to September 11th, as well as a way to bring U.S-style freedom to the Middle East. Now, access to Iraq's oil was always assumed

by many to be the motivation, but that went unspoken from those in power. This time around, Trump is just declaring Venezuela's oil as a key target for the U.S. from the start. He said that the U.S. will seize the oil fields, quote, in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country. He also said that U.S. oil companies will, quote, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken

infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country. No veneer then of nation building, which actually might mean less risk of a quagmire, even though it flies in the face of prior doctrines of U.S. statecraft. Overall, it's a seismic world event that redefines the Western Hemisphere. We could easily spend a whole episode unpacking the geopolitical implications and putting the event in its historical context, but one, that's not exactly this show, and two, at the moment, a lot of the details are completely up in the air. For example, will U.S. influence take hold without boots on the ground? Will the removal of Maduro quell leftist governments

across the region? Or could this, on the other hand, spread a communist revival across the continent?

Instead, what we're going to focus on is how these geopolitical events impact global markets.

Oil markets are the chief focus as the news is digested, but the analysis isn't as simple as it seems.

News reports are using the U.S. Energy

Information Administration's figure that Venezuela has 303 billion barrels of crude oil reserves.

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