In an earlier post, I marvelled at Hugo Chávez’s mishandling of PDVSA. The same applies, however, to the fellow’s handling of the Bolivarian Republic’s fiscal accounts. There is something truly amazing about watching an oil-rich republic run into severe budget problems at a time of record oil prices. The upshot is that Venezuela might be even less able to thumb its nose at ICSID than people currently believe.
How bad are Venezuela’s budget problems? Francisco Rodríguez, whose work has been mentioned three times before on this blog, has done the dirty work of digging into the Bolivarian Republic’s accounting. That isn’t easy, because Venezuela has increasingly resorted to off-budget accounts, which now account for about a fifth of all public spending.
Let’s take them in turn. The first is Fonden. Fonden is ... well, it’s hard to say. The “National Development Fund” gets part of its money from PDVSA and part from the Central Bank. The Central Bank turns over “excess reserves” to Fonden. What does that mean? Answer: a sneaky way of financing the government by printing money. Consider: the Venezuela central bank prints bolívares and exchanges them for dollars. It then hands the dollars over to Fonden. If Fonden uses the money to import stuff, then the process ends. But if Fonden buys domestic goods and services, then it has to hand the dollars back to the central bank in exchange for bolívares. As of the end of 2009, $30.1 billion of Fonden $58.1 billion has come from the Central Bank. (See page 121.) This is, in effect, borrowing.
The second are the Chinese funds, financed by loans from ... duh ... China. Venezuela has borrowed $12 billion from China, going through PDVSA, and an additional $30 billion that is entirely obscure. (The $30 billion is a 10-year financing facility; it does not seem that the Bolivarian Republic has yet drawn any money from it.) It pays back interest and principal on the $12 billion by shipping back oil. How much oil? Well, PDVSA makes it impossible to tell, by mixing fuel oil and crude in the statistics. (See page 127.) You gotta love that.
On page 9, Rodríguez estimates that the country ships about 89 million barrels to China every year in loan payments. At $97 per barrel, that will be $8.6 billion, so either Venezuela is going to pay that debt off very quickly or China is charging an insanely high interest rate. (Inasmuch as PDVSA is shipping fuel oil instead of crude, the loan will paid off even faster.) Private sources estimate the rate is LIBOR plus 2.85%, about 4.0% at the moment. That is a very low rate, consistent with a very short payback period for the loans. Nonetheless, I would not discount the possibility that China may be, in fact, running away with the store.
Finally, PDVSA has taken over many state functions directly, and the Bolivarian government carries out a lot of functions outside the official bureaucracy. That increases both spending and revenues.
The upshot, as a % of GDP:
That’s a pretty phenominal level of mismanagement for a country in the middle of an oil boom. The estimate is that the deficit was 7.9% in 2011, and will be 10.9% in 2012. The government will have access to $10.9 billion of central bank reserves (e.g., printed money), $7.7 billion of new Chinese lending, $15 billion of internal debt, and at least $15 billion of external debt. The reason I say at least is because Venezuela does not issue external debt solely to finance the government; Venezuela also issues external debt to prop up its exchange rate. For example, in the first half of 2011, the government needed only $12 billion, but tapped external financing sources totaling $24 billion.
Venezuelan debt financing:
The result is that at least until the country devalues (which would solve a lot of the financing problems, by raising the bolívar value of oil exports) Venezuela will need access to foreign financing. If that is going to come from private markets, then ExxonMobil will be able to attach it in order to pay any ICSID judgments. If that is going to come from multilateral lending institutions, then Venezuela will need to satisfy the U.S. government: Argentina is the only country to have ignored an ICSID judgment, and the Obama administration has declared that it will oppose new lending to that country. (The relevant testimony comes in this video at minute 41:40; more details here.) Venezuela will likely face even greater opposition. Lastly, if the money is going to come from the Chinese government, then China is going to attach strings (or charge quite a bit) ... and it is far from clear that China would want to weaken the existing system of investor-state arbitration.
Either way, Venezuela’s fiscal problems are a bit stunning to behold. It’s an impressive accomplishment, in its own strange way.
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