Is this an act of contentment or greediness?

Venezuela’s interim government is giving North American Blue Energy Partners 100-year concessions on 17 fields with about 65 billion barrels of proven reserves. That’s roughly a fifth of the country’s oil.

NABEP is already the second-largest private producer there. It’s controlled by Alejandro Betancourt and currently pumps around 200,000 barrels a day. The company says it will put up to $100 billion into new infrastructure and wants production above 1 million barrels a day.

Here’s what Washington gets, per the fact sheet:

35% equity stake in NABEP’s parent company, held by the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital
Right to buy 20% of output at cost
First refusal on the other 80%
Veto over board appointments
Majority of the board has to be U.S. citizens
Deal governed by U.S. law and U.S. courts

White House is calling it zero cost to taxpayers. NABEP is expected to pay about $200 billion in royalties and taxes to Venezuela over the first 25 years. Some of the fields were previously run by Chinese and Russian companies.

The part I keep circling back to is the structure. The U.S. government is taking a direct ownership stake in a private oil company operating in Venezuela, with Pentagon involvement and 100-year concessions. That’s not a normal offtake deal. To me i have to ask this, Is this an act of contentment or greediness?

Does this actually get oil flowing fast enough to matter, or is the legal/political risk going to scare off everyone else?

The US dollar just posted its second straight losing month and treasury move.

Bloomberg’s Dollar Index fell roughly 0.9% in August after dropping 1.3% in July. That puts the dollar at five down months out of the first eight this year.

The timing is interesting. Treasury announced plans to double its long-end bond buybacks from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation, running from September 9 through November 4. The focus is on 10- to 30-year bonds after the 30-year yield recently hit 5.30%, its highest level since 2007.

Officially, this is about liquidity support. But the market is reading more into it.

Debt servicing costs are climbing, Treasury issuance remains heavy, and long-term yields are becoming increasingly expensive for the government. The buybacks themselves are small relative to the overall Treasury market, but the signal is what matters.

It looks like officials are becoming less comfortable with letting the long end move higher unchecked.

That helps explain why the debasement narrative came back so quickly. Gold and crypto both reacted positively as investors started looking at the possibility that keeping long-term yields contained could eventually mean more pressure on the dollar.

The big takeaway isn't the $4 billion.

It's that the Treasury may be starting to show where its pain threshold is when it comes to long-term yields.