Ricardo Hausmann Explains How the Venezuelan Economy Collapsed

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Bloomberg Audio Studios.

Podcasts. Radio. News. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

And I'm Tracy Allaway.

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 a grain perspective. And I think one thing that's very obvious is that, sure, Venezuela may have plenty of natural resources, oil, obviously, but also other ones. And perhaps that the relationship between The US and the current government may be better than it was, but there is gonna be, you know, actually reviving the economy, actually getting in a place of stability and thriving. That's a that's a very long way off to say the least.

Right. So if you have oil in the ground

Yes.

That's great. But it's in the ground, and you need to actually extract it in order to make money. 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? There has to be some sense of stability of the future. Otherwise, as we heard from our previous discussion, people just aren't gonna wanna go there and do business.

Right. So one of the points that he brought up, which I think is very germane to the future and the questions about the country's future, is that, you know, he talked about if there was a talented engineer who worked on some sort of processing plant, in his case, he was talking about Cargill, obviously. If there was someone who is, like, talented in the sort of technical side of them, they hired them in Mexico. You know? They hired them elsewhere. So many people left. And when you think about the security situation on the ground, even again, let's say somehow the foreign money wants to come ba