Venezuela just handed a company called North American Blue Energy Partners the rights to 17 oil fields for 100 years. One hundred years. Your great-grandchildren will still be dealing with this contract when they're arguing about whether Mars accepts Venezuelan crude.
The White House announced this. The Venezuelan interim authorities granted it. Nobody bothered to explain which Venezuelan government we're talking about because apparently that detail doesn't matter when you're locking in a century-long oil deal. Interim means temporary. Temporary governments don't typically sign contracts that outlast the Roman Empire's western half, but here we are.
NABEP gets 17 fields. Not one. Not a trial run. Seventeen. For 100 years. The last time anyone committed to anything for that long, we were still using whale oil and thinking that was a sustainable energy strategy.
Retail traders are currently smashing the buy button on anything with the letters N, A, B, E, or P in the ticker symbol. Someone just bought 50,000 shares of a bankrupt pet food distributor because the company mascot was named Nabisco. Another guy mortgaged his house to go long on a penny stock that mines lithium in Nevada because it had "North American" in the press release from 2019.
The technical analysis on this is simple. Draw a line on your chart. Any line. It doesn't matter. Now extend it 100 years into the future. Congratulations, you've done the same amount of due diligence as everyone involved in this transaction.
U.S.-backed means taxpayer-adjacent. Interim authorities means maybe legitimate. One hundred years means somebody's lying.
Your neighbor Todd just texted his group chat asking if NABEP is publicly traded and whether his Robinhood account lets him buy Venezuelan futures at 50x leverage.
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