Friday Haymaker

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David Hay

Editor

Haymaker

Friday Haymaker

LVG on the BRV

“History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.” -Alexis de Tocqueville

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Hello, Subscribers:

To the trained eye (which might actually be a disadvantage at the moment), the overthrow of Maduro a few days past looks like Regime Change 101. Things of which America and other nations disapproved were happening in a foreign country; America then swooped in to save the day and ~~everything went perfectly well thereafter~~ a period of chaos/confusion immediately followed.

For investors, the key takeaway is about how strategic politics interact with energy supply, legal frameworks, and risk premiums. Market participants are now wrestling with a situation where latent reserves could become real assets, where sanctions status could shift from barrier to incentive, where risk models must evolve to incorporate political intervention as a fluid variable, and where the difference between a headline and cash flow can span years. Countries with high export dependency on Venezuelan crude, global oil benchmarks, and U.S. companies contemplating reentry into Venezuelan energy assets, should all be on watch as this situation evolves.

Placing matters into crystal-clear context for us is none other than longtime friend of the Haymaker (as in, Dave himself) Louis-Vincent Gave. In today’s Guest Haymaker, LVG lays out a series of likely paths upon which the resource-rich, post-Maduro land of Venezuela will soon embark. He also analyzes the near- and long-term market ramifications, identifying some almost-certain victors and losers, while pointing to assumptions that might merit closer consideration by geopolitical strategists and commodity traders alike.

We’d like to leave you with a concluding thought before letting LVG take over. Perhaps China will seek to Venezuela-ize Taiwan; perhaps the U.S. will seek to EU-ize the Americas; perhaps Greenland will become another Seward’s Folly; perhaps none of this. Either way, it’s best we now remember that we are, and always have been, limited in our ability to accuratelyinterpret the longer term consequences of real-time major events.

The Haymaker Team

Note: We had planned to run this in excerpted form, but as the piece is a pretty quick read, it seemed best to share it in its entirety. Enjoy!

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Maduro And The Markets

Louis-Vincent Gave (Originally published January 5th, 2026)

The removal from power of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro had been telegraphed for a while. Nonetheless, the speed of execution of the weekend’s operation was impressive. Leaving aside how the operation happened (the lack of resistance makes it look like Maduro was set up as the fall guy by a regime intent on its own survival) and the broader geopolitical ramifications of the events in Venezuela, the aim of this paper is simply to look at the more obvious market winners and losers…

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