Venezuela’s latest surprise default…China!
Oct 22, 2014 4:08pm
by John Paul Rathbone
Last month Ricardo Hausmann, a normally mild Harvard academic, set off the equivalent of a financial bomb. The economist
suggested that Venezuela had already defaulted on many of its suppliers, its oil service contractors, and its citizens. So who or what might come next?
When Hausmann suggested Wall Street, the market reaction was huge. Indeed Venezuelan bonds, undercut by the falling oil price, have been
dropping ever since. Yet it turns out that Venezuela’s latest default has been, in fact, to China. Given that Beijing is one of Caracas’ closest allies, this is surprising. It is also bullish for Wall Street.
Venezuela has long been a major recipient of Chinese loans, accounting for half of Beijing’s lending to the region. Since 2006, it has taken on $50bn of oil-backed debt. Last year, Rafael Ramirez, the former head of state-oil company PdvSA, revealed that these payments-in kind absorbed over half of Venezuela’s 640,000 barrels per day of oil exports to China. But no more, it seems.
Last week, Venezuela’s national gazette made it official that Caracas no longer needed to export 330,000 barrels bpd to China to pay for its loans. Instead, according to BancTrust, a boutique investment bank, PdVSA can now send as much or as little oil to Beijing as it wants. Furthermore, the terms of the loans have been extended beyond their current three years, perhaps indefinitely. China’s Ministry of Commerce has since confirmed the changes, pointing out they were made at Venezuela’s request.
This de facto debt rescheduling tells us several important things. First, it is another confirmation of Venezuela’s economic and financial distress. To service its Chinese debts at lower oil prices, Venezuela would have had to export comparably more oil. But the country cannot increase oil output quickly. Nor does it have the financial wherewithal to service its Chinese debts in cash instead; foreign reserves are already under pressure. So something else had to be done.
Second, China apparently agreed to the debt rescheduling perhaps because its banks believed in taking the long view. After all, Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves — so one day it will pay. But was the rescheduling China’s preferred choice? As the old saying goes: if you owe the bank $5, you have a problem, but if you owe the bank $5m, the bank has a problem. Either way, China is unlikely to be a source of fresh finance for Venezuela from now on.
Lastly, Venezuela now has 330,000 bpd of oil – equivalent to almost $25m a day or $9bn a year — that it can use for other ends. One use might be to ease the import crunch that has resulted in shortages of so many basic goods, such as toilet paper. Another might be to divert resources to meet international bond payments. Either way, Venezuela is struggling and so far Wall Street is still being paid. But for how much longer?
(FT)