Where Has Venezuela's Oil Gone?

It's now been just over 200 days since the USA struck Venezuela and captured its incumbent president Nicolas Maduro.

The operation was met with mixed reactions from the international community, but one of the central justifications for all of this is that Venezuelan oil could pay for everything.

Properly accessing the world's largest oil reserves could rebuild the country under a friendly regime, repay its debts to international creditors, provide a lucrative revenue stream for a select group of international oil companies, and also just get more oil out into international markets and western

refineries. In the months since, that last point has for unrelated reasons become even more important, obviously.

So then, where has that oil actually gone? The best answer is we do not really know, but we do have some clues.

And theoretically, if oil is flowing in one direction, there really should be money flowing in the other direction as well. And a lot of that money that we do know so far has ended up in Qatar of all places. So what is going on here? Why is an otherwise completely unrelated [music] country holding onto this money

instead of the treasury of the USA, or even a private oil company? At least that would make sense, right? Now, the obvious conclusion that a lot of commentators have jumped to is that this is just to make it easier to embezzle this money in a third-party jurisdiction out of the reach of the US

or Venezuelan authorities. [music] Now, the good news is that besides this possibility, there are genuine reasons for this strange offshore banking setup to exist like this. The bad news is that those genuine reasons are probably worse than just regular old embezzlement anyway. It also doesn't stop there

either. Part of the plan with Venezuela is that the oil companies will make a major investment of reportedly up to a hundred billion dollars into the country to modernize its infrastructure and enable the extraction of even more oil.

But historically speaking, investing in Venezuela has been a terrible idea to the point where part of the reason why they can't even hold onto their own oil revenue is because all of the previous investors throughout their modern history are still trying to sue them to get their previous investments back. So

there is a lot going on here and a lot of questions to answer. So, where is Venezuela's oil actually going? Where is the money [music] from that oil going?

Why is Qatar involved in any of this? Why is China so angry? Are the major oil companies really going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into this country? What happens if and or when government leadership in the USA changes? And finally, is there a realistic way that any of this could actually end well?