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Venezuela: The world’s worst oil company

Steve Hanke tweeted the graph on the world’s most miserable country,

To put PDVSA’s depletion rate into perspective, let’s compare it to Exxon’s. At the end of 2015, Exxon’s depletion rate was 8.15% — which is comparable to most of the world’s major oil companies. That rate implies Exxon’s median time to extraction (and sale) for a barrel of oil is 8.2 years. That’s 190 years earlier than PDVSA would realize revenue from selling a barrel of oil. Given the rate at which Exxon is depleting its reserves, they are worth something. Indeed, if we discount at 10%, Exxon’s reserves are worth 46% of the well-head value. Not zero, as is the case for PDVSA.

So, with the way PDVSA operates, it is exploiting reserves so slowly as to render them, on average, worthless. If that’s not bad enough, PDVSA is generating negative cash flows and piling up a mountain of debt (see the chart above). The arithmetic does not look good. PDVSA faces $10 bil. in interest and principal payments this year, but reports estimate that PDVSA only has $2 bil. in cash to service its debt obligations. In principle, the government could come to the rescue. But, its stated reserves have dwindled to below $10.5 bil.

Read the full article here.

Steel production is nil: Struggling to smelt, Venezuela state-run steelmaker grows sunflowers, crops

Workers at Venezuelan steelmaker Sidor are planting sunflowers and vegetables on company premises to ease a national food deficit as steel output has almost ground to a halt nine years after the company was taken over by the government.

In other headlines:
Congratulations Bolivarian Socialists, Venezuela Caught Up With North Korea

That’s according to the recent 2017 Index of Economic Freedom ranking, which places Venezuela in 179th position — next to North Korea, which occupies the 180th.

Published by the Heritage Foundation, the Economic Freedom report measures such things as trade freedom, business freedom, investment freedom, and the degree of property rights protection in 180 countries actually ranked.

Venezuela is also catching up with North Korea in corruption, while it is well ahead in inflation, which runs at 800%.

Lilian Tintori, Wife of Venezuelan jailed leader describes 3 years of torture

Peru’s president recalls envoy over attacks by Venezuela, after Nicolás Maduro referred to Peruvian president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski as a ‘coward’ and a ‘dog’ subservient to US, following PPK’s White House visit – the first by a Latin American president.

At the blogs:
How long is it going to take to crawl out of this hole?



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