MULTILATERAL · MACRO & FINANCING
International Monetary Fund
The International Monetary Fund publishes macroeconomic projections on Venezuela and would be a central actor in any financing and restructuring program after a normalization.
VE Pulses
27Venezuelan crude halves its discount to Brent in two months
In July, the Venezuelan benchmark sold $16.61 below Brent; in September, $8.27. With output nearly flat, the month's gain came from price.
Calixto Ortega takes the IMF a plan for the bolívar to cover every domestic transaction in Venezuela
Before the Fund, the vice president for the economy ruled out dollarization. The plan published by the central bank leaves the dollar to foreign trade and sets two-digit inflation as the condition, with no date to reach it.
The IMF estimates Venezuela's GDP grew 9% in 2025, six times what it calculated in April
The Fund's new series shows a deeper fall between 2018 and 2020 and a faster recovery since 2022. In the same tables, projected inflation rises and the external surplus it expected in April turns into a deficit.
The round of talks Washington announced for Wednesday the 14th puts the Supreme Court ahead of the electoral council
After two rounds in Caracas, Washington put the order of the negotiation in writing: first the 32 justices, by December; the overhaul of the electoral authority, in rounds that still have no date.
Delcy Rodríguez sets a year-end deadline for the law opening Corpoelec's power grid to private companies
The bill letting private companies into generation, transmission and distribution has been waiting for its second reading since June 2. Before the country's largest business federation, the acting president said it will pass before the year is out.
Domestic market first, LNG later: the order of Baker Hughes' gas alliance with PDVSA
The official note on Friday the 2nd's meeting with the acting president mentioned no signing; on Monday the 5th, Baker Hughes announced a framework signed with PDVSA and two US partners. Each project will need its own definitive agreement and an OFAC authorization.
The United States took almost six of every ten barrels of oil Venezuela exported in September
Venezuela exported 9% less oil in September than in August, while trading houses pressed for bigger discounts to cover freight. Shipments fell to Europe and India and rose to the United States.
Freight from José to the Gulf went from $1.90 to $5 a barrel and it is pressing the price of Merey
Until now the argument about the Venezuelan barrel was how much gets produced and who buys it. The cost of moving it has multiplied two and a half times in nine months, and the houses that ship more than half of exports want that difference taken out of the price.
Venezuelan crude reaches the United States at a record pace and Washington will not say what the Treasury holds
Last week it was 782,000 barrels a day, the largest volume of the year. What those cargoes pay is held in custody by Washington, and on Tuesday the man who holds it appeared before Congress without giving the balance.
Venezuela's exchange no longer values companies: it lends to them, and that is 96.5% of its volume
The country has a capital market that works, though not to value companies: it works to fund them short-term, the one thing banks cannot do today.
The IMF's first visit to Caracas in twenty years starts with the books, not with credit
A country whose books no one has reviewed since 2004 cannot receive structured funding; that the Fund starts with method and statistics says what is missing before any program exists.
The $346 million Venezuela drew from the IMF was the last money within reach that carried no conditions
The three money channels opened to Venezuela came with three different levels of oversight, and the one with the least is the one flowing straight into state accounts.
Venezuela has decreed the opening of its entire oil chain; the fiscal fine print and control of the money are missing
Venezuela decreed an opening that unlocks the whole chain but leaves the reservoir in the State's hands; what it does not settle is the fiscal fine print or control of the money: crude under Treasury custody and gold in London.
Venezuela bans exports of the cement it lacks to rebuild itself
With its constitutional term lapsed and no election, the State is funding reconstruction with bank credit and controls —not its own coffers— even as Brent's slide thins the one source of dollars it ultimately needs.
Venezuela's post-quake reconstruction rests on a government that today loses its constitutional footing
Venezuela's recovery does not falter over cost but over its footing: the response to the victims and the reconstruction lean on a government whose constitutional basis, jurists say, expires today.
The earthquake has already priced Venezuela's rebuild; the money to pay for it is missing
The earthquake has stopped being only a humanitarian emergency and become a financing one: rebuilding costs several points of GDP and the money assembled covers barely a fraction —on a state with no margin.
The only thing the quake did not touch in Venezuela is the oil; everything else now leans more on Washington
The quake did not change the weight the U.S. already had on Venezuela; it made it more visible. The emergency added U.S. military and logistical presence —accepted by Caracas— over a country whose oil till, untouched by the quake, is already managed in part from abroad.
Venezuela enters a state of emergency after a double earthquake of magnitude 7.2 and 7.5
Venezuela lived its reopening as a Washington permits problem; the double quake confronts it with a harder limit: a state with no margin to protect its people or its infrastructure, just as it negotiates the largest debt in its history.
Venezuela posts its best oil quarter in years, and the bond market answers by falling
The oil rebound now has numbers behind it, but the market that would finance the country answered by selling: without knowing how much of its debt it will pay or under what rules, the recovery is a figure, not yet an investment thesis.
Who finances Venezuela's companies when banks won't lend and dollars are rationed?
The scaffolding of the opening is foreign and long-term —oil capital, a power plan stamped by the U.S.— but it doesn't reach the floor: the bolívar crosses 600 and the company funds itself, alone, on the Caracas exchange.
Venezuela's State seizes Bolívar's gold by force, 672 MW of idle hydropower restart under a U.S. license, and the bolívar holds on reserves
The record barrel funds Venezuela's recovery but buys no structure: the State reorders the gold rent by force, the power grid restarts only with a U.S. license, and the bolívar holds by spending reserves. Volume flows; the rest is the pending test.
The U.S. blockades Venezuela's sanctioned crude by sea and presses on its oil law, as a Middle East truce cheapens the barrel
Washington controls all four levers of Venezuela's oil revenue —cash, rules, route and now the price— so its record export volume decides less and less.
The State prepares to offer its assets through the Caracas Stock Exchange as global investment banks and the IMF move closer to Venezuela
The institutional capital and the mechanism to sell it state assets advance fast; the judicial arbiter that would give those contracts certainty is being recomposed this week with no guarantees of independence.
June opens with the first formal technical IMF-Venezuela session in six years — and with the opposition setting the electoral date as a condition
The doors the international financial system pushed open over the weekend open a technical channel — but the electoral calendar, which the street demands, remains without a date.
Caracas redesigns itself in 90 days, India receives 319 kbpd from Venezuela and LNG Energy commits US$200M to upstream
The State apparatus reengineering, the oil flow to India and the return of U.S. private capital run at once on the same second-quarter timeline — and the operational question is whether the three are coordinated or each responds to a different principal.
Venezuela's transition opens the week with two Washington tracks that no longer pretend to converge
While John Barrett pushes the new Mining Law with Hydrocarbons and the Central Bank in Caracas, and the BCV technical delegation travels to Washington to open the formal IMF cycle, the Unitary Platform regroups in Panama without explicit White House mandate. The uncertainty is not about phases, it is about simultaneous channels.
Chevron at 49%: first binding major expansion in the Rodríguez era
The Petroindependencia deal consolidates the heavy crude bet as the opposition formalizes its demand for a new electoral body and elections
Analysis
04Two Venezuelas? The IMF sees 9% growth; the minimum wage is still 130 bolívares
The IMF’s new series matches the central bank’s: 9% in 2025, with oil growing 15% and government consumption 0.6%. Growth reaches those paid in dollars by a company, not the public payroll, stuck at 130 bolívares since 2022. The pay rule announced for 2027 proposes tying remuneration to GDP.
Venezuela GDP Q1 2026 (+2.5%): BCV transparency and the road to IMF Article IV
The Central Bank of Venezuela released first-quarter 2026 results on May 20 after sixteen months of statistical opacity. GDP +2.5% year-on-year — slowest expansion since Q2 2021 —, non-oil +3.11%, hydrocarbon sector -2.12%, Financial Services +13.46%, Construction -18.30%. The release frames the reactivation with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and opens the path toward the first IMF technical mission in June or July and eventually to the Article IV consultation pending since 2004.
Venezuela returns to the IMF: the country that paid its debt, isolated itself for 21 years, and now has $4.9B waiting
What are SDRs, what happened to other countries that did the same, and what it means for reconstruction
GL-57: Venezuela's financial reconnection and what it means for the investor
For the first time in seven years, the BCV operates in dollars. Bessent backs IMF return. $4.9B in SDRs await release.
Sector Briefs
04Production crosses 1 million bpd and majors sign: upstream closes Q1 with complete framework and binding power ceiling
VE-ENERGY-UPSTREAM April 2026 brief. Hydrocarbons reform passed (Jan 29), OFAC GL 52 (Mar 18), formal returns from Eni, Repsol and Chevron in April. Production 1.095M bpd, exports >1M for the first time in 6 months. India overtakes China as top buyer at 343K bpd. Revenues channeled to U.S. Treasury custody via EO 14373. The binding ceiling remains electrical (covered in VE-ENERGY-DOMESTICO).
Venezuelan power sector: $15–40B to light up a country Siemens and GE already inspected
VE-ENERGY April brief. GL 48A active, Wright in February, Siemens/GE inspections in March, Delcy announcement in April. The legal-enablement layer is closed; payment mechanism and power reform are not. The power constraint ceilings oil production at 1.2M bpd.
The bi-monetary economy grows double digits while the bolivar loses a quarter of its value
The macroeconomic outlook evaluated for the investor. GDP, inflation, exchange rate, budget and monetary policy.
Multidimensional assessment: political, regulatory, operational, fiscal, sanctions, legal, social and exchange rate
Multidimensional assessment: political, regulatory, operational, fiscal, sanctions, legal, social and FX.
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