PPCC: Pisitófilos Creditófagos. Invierno 2025

[muyuu]

A canarias , Ceuta o melilla ¿le iría mejor o peor siendo marruecos en vez de españa?
Hace unos años la respuesta la tenía clara , ahora no tanto.

yo creo que ellos lo tienen bastante claro

[tomasjos]

Trump exige a Venezuela que ponga fin a las relaciones con China, Rusia, Irán y Cuba https://share.google/ALaajfJa3XdjgQ419

Lo actualizo
Trump ordena a Venezuela expulsar a los agentes de China, Rusia, Irán y Cuba que operan en Caracas https://share.google/w50iHtAPsuINlS83v

Y China y Rusia apenas hacen nada sino protestar diplomáticamente. Está claro que hay un acuerdo bajo la mesa entre los tres

[tomasjos]

Trump analiza opciones para adquirir Groenlandia y no descarta la militar, según la Casa Blanca https://share.google/jL9ITIAydnXzZau2E

[tomasjos]

El precio de la vivienda en España pondrá a prueba la salud del mercado en 2026 | Vozpópuli https://share.google/BtR3REI552821WjtD

[Saturio]

Trump exige a Venezuela que ponga fin a las relaciones con China, Rusia, Irán y Cuba https://share.google/ALaajfJa3XdjgQ419

Lo actualizo
Trump ordena a Venezuela expulsar a los agentes de China, Rusia, Irán y Cuba que operan en Caracas https://share.google/w50iHtAPsuINlS83v

Y China y Rusia apenas hacen nada sino protestar diplomáticamente. Está claro que hay un acuerdo bajo la mesa entre los tres

Los pactos de hoy vete a saber lo que son mañana.

[tomasjos]

Ataque de EEUU a Venezuela: captura de Nicolás Maduro y últimas noticias de Donald Trump, en directo https://share.google/bxNGa7nVp8ZSv1V4B

Si estuviéramos en Burbuja abriríamos un hilo "Se está liando parda en Groenlandia" o algo asi. Porque está escalando la situación

[tomasjos]

El PP se abre a negociar con Sánchez el envío de tropas a Ucrania sin aclarar su apoyo https://share.google/bZw2tvw47sGYb4CSn

[CHOSEN]

No creo que a Marruecos le interese ser el socio eterno de EEUU siendo como es vecino de Europa.
Está en una posición táctica, no estratégica.
La UE es un organismo centrípeto.

[tomasjos]

Tropas de EEUU abordan en Islandia el petrolero que escapó del bloqueo de Venezuela en diciembre https://share.google/8Z8i3dt6oO1Xu6wNV

Definitivamente se está liando parda ....partout

[muyuu]

Tropas de EEUU abordan en Islandia el petrolero que escapó del bloqueo de Venezuela en diciembre https://share.google/8Z8i3dt6oO1Xu6wNV

Definitivamente se está liando parda ....partout

Por lo visto Rusia les pidió que no lo abordaran.

https://youtu.be/vyW_fmInhAw?si=6M7pazC9ZMBX088o

https://youtu.be/O4mEiEfDuTU?si=vDykVPkIdxp7xEu1

[Fomento Cemento]

Qué llevarían en esa chatarra...

UK's MoD confirms that they provided support to U.S. for the seizure of the Russian-flagged oil tanker, Bella 1.

[Derby]

https://www.baha.com/Rubio-Meeting-on-Greenland-next-week/news/details/65440651

Rubio: Meeting on Greenland next week

United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Wednesday that the meeting on Greenland will take place next week, with Washington to hold discussions with the Danish authorities.

Speaking to reporters, Rubio shared that US President Donald Trump always intended to purchase Greenland, "from the very beginning." "This is not new. He talked about it in his first term. And he is not the first US president that has examined how could we acquire Greenland. There's an interest there," he commented.

[Derby]

https://www.baha.com/WH-We-have-begun-marketing-Venezuelan-oil/news/details/65440811

WH: We have begun marketing Venezuelan oil

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Wednesday that the United States government "has already begun" marketing Venezuelan crude oil to global markets.

"This was the sanctioned oil that was sitting in barrels ... because of the effective quarantine of the US," Leavitt said during her press briefing. "The interim authorities [of Venezuela] have agreed to release that oil to the US, so it will be arriving here very soon," she remarked.

Leavitt also stated that the US is selectively rolling back sanctions on Venezuela, confirming earlier reports.

[Derby]

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2026/01/why-politicians-wont-fix-affordability.html

Why Politicians Won’t Fix Affordability, Yves Smith

(...)The dominant narrative on affordability comes down to inflation as far as most of these political commentators are concerned. They’re talking about affordability as if it is a problem of rising prices, and food, energy, transport, and housing costs are usually blamed. But alongside that, there’s also inflation in  global supply chains that is said to be the cause, and that is terribly   convenient for the politicians in question because they can point to causes outside their borders and therefore say, “Don’t blame me.”

They’re saying instead that consumers must shop around and cut back, and all of this framing is misleading, and there’s a good reason for that.

Inflation has, in fact,  eased in many places. It is in the UK, and yet affordability has not returned.   People still feel financially trapped. This tells us that prices are not the real driver of the affordability crisis that is going on; something deeper is happening.

In this real affordability crisis,  it is not pricing that is the issue. The reality is that it is the extraction of income that is the issue. People   are actually losing most of their net income after tax before they can choose how to live, because imposed costs on so many households are so high that those households are effectively losing control over their finances. That is the centre of the affordability crisis.

Income extraction happens in all sorts of ways.

Excessive rent drains income immediately. Mortgage interest that is locking households into long-term payments over which they have literally no control  are another aspect of this, whilst interest costs are also embedded in many everyday prices and fees, and charges are unavoidable, whilst  essential services are demanding payments which are increasing very often at rates above inflation, regardless of a person’s income.

This is not ordinary inflation, then, because inflation is usually temporary. That is one of the ways in which we identify it. There’s a period when prices rise excessively, and then they drop back to normal, and we can say, we understand as a consequence that inflation is a phenomenon that passes, as history proves.

But what is going on now is a form of permanent extraction, which is why living standards are not rising. Charges rise, but very rarely fall. Payments have become unavoidable for many things that are essential, or as we see them are essential in life, and people cannot opt out.

All of this is the consequence of policy choice. Remember, the economic policy has shifted power towards capital inside our society and capital is owned by wealthy people. Income is, as a consequence, flowing upwards through rents and interest.

Fees and subscriptions are also proliferating.  Once upon a time, you bought your software, and it was yours for life; now you rent it.

Once upon a time, you paid a television licence fee for a year, and that was it.  Now you have to pay multiple fees to multiple companies to get access to channels because that is the way the market’s been divided,   and we pay a great deal more as a result.

These outcomes were chosen; they’re not accidental.

Housing is a clear example of this; housing costs dominate many household budgets.  Rent is moving upwards; it is something   that many people obviously have no choice about. You must have a roof over your head, and mortgage interest is an approximator to rent, of course, and interest transfers are moving wealth from those who have to borrow to buy a home to those who are lending. That provides the banks with power, and it also provides those who deposit with banks and who get interest as a result with power.

Supply, at the same time, is being constrained by design; in other words,  there aren’t enough houses in the marketplace, and this is deliberate, and we  can see it because we know that so many builders have so many plots of land they can build on, but won’t, and housing reveals, as a consequence, the true structure of extraction from people by design.

Housing is not unique.  Our phones are subject to this lack of competition as well. There are only a few players in the market, and prices are remarkably similar.   You can play around a bit at the edges, but fundamentally, we pay a great deal for something that used to be rather ordinary.

And our utility companies operate as if they are regulated monopolies precisely because, well, that is exactly what they are. They are regulated monopolies, and what is more,  the regulation is designed to make sure that prices are maximised and not minimised, whilst banking   fees are difficult to avoid, and everywhere we go when we buy new products and services, we find we’re either having to rent the facility that we want to use, or we are offered add-ons that are effectively ways of extracting more income from us. The warranty, or insurance, or whatever else it might be: all of those are services designed to extract profit from us.

This is not about protecting us. Competition doesn’t do that. In fact, it’s doing the exact opposite. Regulation is making it harder, rather than easier, in many cases, to switch providers, and that is often costly or impossible because even if the regulator says we should be able to move, our contracts don’t. We sign up for 24 months or something like that to get the best offer, and as a result, we can’t get out, and we are penalised for exiting.

Market power is concentrated as a result by limiting the alternatives, and genuine competition disappears as a consequence. Consumers are being kept captive by contract, which avoids regulation, and as a result, prices are rising without justification.

Firms raise prices because they can, not because costs have increased, and market power is enabling this, weak regulation is allowing it, and consumers are bearing the burden.

As I’ve already mentioned, this is happening with increased financialisation. I particularly dislike this aspect of this part of the market. Products are bundled with financial add-ons; you might not see them in that way, but that’s exactly what they are.  Warranties and insurance are just financial services products. They are there supposedly to sell you protection, but they’re packaged with fear.   These products are rarely used and are highly profitable. In fact, they are most of the way in which people who sell  phones, cars, white goods, software, and other subscriptions make their money. It is really   quite extraordinary how much money is taken from us in this way, and it is, I stress, deliberate; it’s by design: these things are embedded in the business models of the companies that sell them.

They are trying to maximise their revenue per customer exactly as economics says they should. This is what people are taught to do at business school, at universities, doing economics courses, and everything else, but they rely on behavioural pressure on us as consumers, and they extract value continuously.

Consumers have no counterpower against this situation. Inflation shocks may pass, but rent and profit extraction continue.

That is the true nature of the affordability crisis we face.

That is why it is not an inflation crisis.

This is what politicians aren’t talking about.

They aren’t saying that charges, these impositions upon us, are becoming permanent, and household budgets are becoming perpetually squeezed.

Affordability is collapsing structurally, and this is a political failure, which is why our politicians aren’t referring to it.(...)

By Richard Murphy, Emeritus Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School and a director of Tax Research LLP. Originally published at Funding the Future

PD https://youtu.be/rmnr6nS9G5s

[Derby]

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/05/business/venezuela-trump-oil-chevron

Big Oil doesn’t share Trump’s dream of making Venezuelan oil great again


A crude oil tanker waits its turn to be loaded with crude oil at Lake Maracaibo in Maracaibo, Zulia State, Venezuela on May 9, 2025. Federico Parra/AFP/Getty Images)

New York — President Donald Trump may have made a major miscalculation about Venezuela’s oil.

Trump has expressed excitement over the prospect of US oil companies getting their hands on Venezuela’s vast oil resources.

But industry sources tell CNN that American oil executives are unlikely to dive headfirst into Venezuela for multiple reasons: The situation on the ground remains very uncertain, Venezuela’s oil industry is in shambles and Caracas has a history of seizing US oil assets.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that oil prices are too low today to justify spending the gobs of money – possibly tens of billions of dollars – that would be required to revive Venezuela’s decaying oil industry.

“The appetite for jumping into Venezuela right now is pretty low. We have no idea what the government there will look like,” one well-placed industry source told CNN on Monday. “The president’s desire is different than the industry’s. And the White House would have known that if they had communicated with the industry prior to the operation on Saturday.”

“All of our oil companies are ready and willing to make big investments in Venezuela that will rebuild their oil infrastructure, which was destroyed by the illegitimate Maduro regime,” White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said in a statement to CNN. “American oil companies will do an incredible job for the people of Venezuela and will represent the United States well.”

A senior White House official told CNN that Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Secretary of State Marco Rubio will be leading the effort to engage with the oil industry on behalf of Trump. The official said correspondence with oil companies has already begun and will continue.

Wright will meet with oil executives this week to discuss US companies once again standing up drilling for oil in Venezuela, a spokesperson for the Energy Department said.

Two sources previously told CNN that while Trump officials engaged US oil companies to weigh interest in returning to Venezuela, energy companies were reluctant to commit to reinvesting there.

‘Rhetoric before reality’

Venezuela has more proven oil reserves than any country on the planet, more than Iraq, Russia and the United States combined, according to federal estimates.

Yet when oil companies decide to invest in far-flung drilling projects, they need confidence about what the operating environment there will look like years, if not decades, into the future. These days it’s hard to feel solid about Venezuela’s form of government and institutions weeks from now, let alone years.

“Just because there are oil reserves – even the largest in the world – doesn’t mean you’re necessarily going to produce there,” another industry source told CNN. “This isn’t like standing up a food truck operation.”

This source said the Trump administration put “rhetoric before reality” and stressed political stability is “paramount” when companies weigh investing overseas.



‘Venezuela is broke’

Years of underinvestment, economic crisis and international exile have left Venezuela’s oil infrastructure in a state of disrepair.

“Venezuela is broke. It doesn’t have any money. The national oil company is in disarray. It can barely feed its people,” said Luisa Palacios, a former Citgo chairwoman who was born and raised in Venezuela.

Just to keep Venezuela’s oil production flat at 1.1 million barrels per day – roughly equal to what North Dakota currently produces – would require about $53 billion of investment over the next 15 years, according to estimates published Monday by consulting firm Rystad Energy.


A worker holds a gas pump and US dollars at a Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA) gas station in Caracas, Venezuela, on December 1, 2022. Matias Delacroix/Bloomberg/Getty Images

However, to return Venezuela to its glory days of 3 million barrels per day from the late 1990s, total oil and gas capital spending would need to reach a staggering $183 billion through 2040, according to Rystad’s analysis.

That huge figure reflects not only Venezuela’s aging infrastructure but the fact that most of its oil is considered “heavy,” a blend of crude that is harder and more expensive to refine and process than the lighter oil found in the Permian Basin of West Texas.

$60 oil won’t inspire investment

Crude is also cheap right now. Oil prices plunged by 20% last year – their worst since 2020.

Cheap oil is great for consumers, driving down gasoline prices to four-year lows. However, that same low-price environment makes oil CEOs, and their shareholders, reluctant to gamble on risky projects.

“The idea that there will be an overnight restart of the Venezuelan oil industry is just unrealistic. It’s all very premature,” said Doug Leggate, Wolfe Research’s managing director of integrated oil, refiners and exploration & production.

Of course, it’s possible the Trump administration could try to overcome these concerns by making guarantees designed to incentivize US investment in Venezuela. It’s too early to say whether such incentives will be offered.

Chevron could stand to gain

In any case, analysts and industry executives say only a select few US oil companies have the deep pockets and knowhow to develop production in Venezuela.

Chevron is at the top of that list because the Houston-based company is the only major Western oil giant that has kept a significant footprint in Venezuela throughout decades of upheaval.


View of the Peace Monument sculpture in front of the Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) headquarters in Caracas, on December 2, 2022. Miguel Zambrano/AFP/Getty Images

“Chevron is the best positioned among US oil companies – by far,” said Francisco Monaldi, a fellow in Latin American energy policy at Rice University.

Chevron currently produces about 150,000 barrels per day in Venezuela, according to Rystad, operating under a sanctions license the Trump administration recently extended.

Chevron declined to answer questions about its level of interest in ramping up production in Venezuela now that President Nicolás Maduro has been removed from power.

Exxon and Conoco are owed billions

ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, two other major US oil companies, also have the expertise and balance sheets to help revive Venezuela.

Yet both companies may still be scarred from their prior experiences in Venezuela.

Former Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez nationalized Exxon and Conoco’s oil assets around 2006. While Chevron decided to stay and work with Caracas, Exxon and Conoco left and had their assets seized.

Conoco is still trying to recover an estimated $12 billion from the prior nationalization of its Venezuela assets, while ExxonMobil is seeking to recover almost $2 billion, according to Reuters.

“Venezuela is the country that has seen the most expropriation cases brought against it. This means the starting risk premium there is very high,” said Palacios, the former Citgo executive who is now interim director of research and managing director of energy transition finance at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

Exxon is focused on developing blockbuster oil discoveries in nearby Guyana, which in the span of a few years has gone from almost no oil production to surpassing that of Venezuela.

“Venezuela is not the only game in town – not even in Latin America,” Palacios said.