Venezuelan Clean Product Taper

Following the death of Hugo Chavez in March of 2013, Nicolas Maduro took over as interim president of Venezuela. Maduro, Chavez’s hand-picked successor, narrowly won a general election several weeks later, with a hair thin 1.5% margin. Since then, Venezuela has experienced a period of hyper-inflation, military take overs of retail shops and widespread consumer goods shortages. This week, he was granted emergency decree powers, giving him dictatorial control over wide segments of the country and economy. The effects of state mismanagement have affected the state run oil company, PDVSA as well. The company has experienced an increasing number of production related issues, declining investment in refining projects and numerous refinery fires and outages. PDVSA sold a $4.5 billion dollar bond issuance last week, but will not be using any of the money to expand oil production capacity, but rather to service debt and provide hard currency for day-to-day operations. Download here