The Economic Hitmen Take Venezuela
Reflecting on futures studies, geopolitical risk arbitrageurs and Venezuelan oil.
A. During my MSc in Strategic Foresight, its founder Professor Richard A. Slaughter would often comment on recent books. One of these was the John Perkins book Confessions of an Economic Hitman now in its third edition (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2023). Slaughter echoed Susan Strange and heterodox International Political Economy scholars in critiquing the geopolitical risk arbitrageurs who profit from anomalies and temporary mispricings when flashpoints and hotspots occur. At the time, I was also experimenting with a Vital Signs Monitor daily report for the former Disinformation site. The VSM drew specifically on the work of Don Edward Beck, Christopher C. Cowan, and Natasha Todorovic-Cowan in the Spiral Dynamics community: Beck got me to speak by phone to his Spiral Dynamics 2000 Confab, whilst Cowan and Todorovic-Cowan kindly got me to talk in the geopolitics section of their Spiral Dynamics II training certification seminars. I thus had a framework to apply to the Perkins, Strange, and Slaughter critique.
B. This is relevant to Venezuela. US SOF Delta Force has seized Venezuelan leader Nicholas Maduro. An hour before I read this, I checked the Nymex and Brent Crude / WTI oil futures (both were slightly down); and queried ChatGPT on companies exposed: Chevron (NYSE:CVX), Exxon Mobil (NYSE:XOM) and Schlumberger (NYSE:SLB) had all risen in price (Chevron most dramatically in terms of its Delta convexity) over the past 5 days - and were slightly down in out of hours trading. This will impact both equities and futures markets on 5th January - when ISM numbers for December 2025 are also released. The ISM - which is used as a proxy to track United States manufacturing output - has fallen in the past few months - suggesting that there are supply chain problems which James Rickards wrote about in Sold Out! How Severed Supply & Surging Inflation Will End Consumer Choice (New York: Penguin, 2022).
C. United States actions underway in Venezuela are no surprise to seasoned analysts of geopolitical risk. Over two decades ago Professor Michael T. Klare warned of resources wars: I wrote an MA essay on him. L. Fletcher Prouty who was the real life basis for X (Donald Sutherland) in Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) also warned of this in his memoir The Secret Team which influenced the late Lt Col. Dr Michael A. Aquino (himself an SOF Green Beret and PhD qualified political scientist as distinct from his Satanic Panic populist villain status). It would also be a good time to read Edward N. Luttwak’s work, notably Coup d’Etat: A Practical Handbook (Boston MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). The still unfolding Venezuela events will also play in the short-term into the conspiratorial view (revived in QAnon, Pizzagate and the MAGA movement in the second Trump administration) as expressed in samizdat manuals like Silent Weapons For Quiet Wars which is alleged to have been written in 1979; was found in an IBM copier for sale in 1986; and which the late William Milton Cooper popularised in his Deep State fears of a New World Order. The second Trump administration clearly wants regime change in Venezuela. What the US SOF Delta Force has conducted in capturing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is called a surgical strike as part of irregular, unconventional or special warfare campaigns (2017 evaluation).
D. A Morgan Stanley presentation from 2010 on Quantitative Hedge Fund Strategies: An Investor’s Perspective (PDF). Unsurprisingly, this details the well known market neutral and statistical arbitrage trading strategies; the catalyst event and other volatility-seeking alpha generation trading strategies are mentioned yet not detailed. Robert I. Webb’s Trading Catalysts (London: FT Press, 2006); Andrew Busch’s World Event Trading (Hoboken, N: John Wiley & Sons, 2007); Marko Papic’s Geopolitical Alpha (Hoboken, NK: John Wiley & Sons, 2020); and Asif Suria’s The Event-Driven Edge (Hampshire, United Kingdom: Harriman House, 2024) provide some now outdated historical studies of event arbitrage that you can extract the specific event catalysts; the structural arbitrage; and the ontologies for - using the AGI tool of your choice.
E. NYU Stern has posted its 2026 syllabi for its undergraduate and graduate courses. Some useful examples include: Analytics for Decision Making (PDF); Collaboration, Conflict and Negotiation (PDF); Power and Professional Influence (PDF); Digital Disruption: Creating and Capturing Consumer Value (PDF); Foundations of AI Agents (PDF); Robo Advisors and Systematic Trading; Digital Innovation and Crowdsourcing; The Future of Work (PDF); High-Performance Teams (PDF); Operations Management (PDF); Forecasting Time Series Data (PDF); Mathematics of Investment (PDF); Programming & Algorithms Using Python (PDF); Dealing With Data (PDF)'; AI/ML Product Management (PDF); Data Science and AI for Business (PDF); and Introduction to Cybersecurity and Privacy Management (PDF). All of these (and others) illustrate the corpus of where NYU Stern and other leading international business schools are moving to in terms of integrating fintech, venture capital oriented entrepreneurship; and data science. This dynamic synthesis was foreseen in John Sullivan and Angela Zutavern’s book The Mathematical Corporation: Where Machine Intelligence and Human Ingenuity Achieve the Impossible (New York: Public Affairs, 2017) and in Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson’s Machine Platform Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2018).
F. John Michael Greer on the Nobel laureate poet W.B. Yeats who was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Yeats is often championed for his influence on education (the Kwong Lee Dow building of the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Education has a Yeats quote) yet this initiatory / magical period of his life is often glossed over. It can be understood as a form of highly focused giftedness education using experiential rituals and hieratic symbolism (in part classical Greek, ancient Egyptian and Masonic / Rosicrucian influenced - and also some of it simply made up) that enabled Yeats to flourish. This can also be understood in terms of Howard Gardner’s (more contemporary) multiple intelligences framework.
G. A DW documentary on Palantir’s co-founder Alex Karp. I recently have read Karp and Nicholas Zamiska’s The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West (London: Jonathan Cape, 2025) and am currently listening to Michael Steinberger’s The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (London: Simon & Schuster UK, 2025).
H. Investor Michael Burry (popularised in the Michael Lewis book and subsequent film adaptation The Big Short - tailers 1 & 2) on what he foresees in 2026.