Ed

uh, in Venezuela.

And you realize this is not a great look for the drillers themselves, the, you know, like the Chevrons and the X-Rons, you know, you might make a joke that it's a lot easier to extract a president from Venezuela than it is to extract oil.

So I think that's fascinating.

But there is a kind of side plot that you haven't mentioned that takes us kind of from the macro to the micro that I'd like to mention in this context.

Like, while all this stuff has been going on in Venezuela, we have seen the emergence of a character that I am calling Donald Trump with Elizabeth Warren characteristics.

And this is someone who in the last few days, Donald Trump has come out and said he doesn't want defense companies to pay dividends or buy back shares or pay their CEOs a lot of money.

because now presidents apparently decide how private companies allocate capital and pay their employees.

And those stocks are now up, because he then went on to say, after those stocks tanked, we're going to spend a lot more money on guns.

Half a trillion.

Half a trillion more.

Yeah.

Who needs Congress to throw another half a trillion dollars at the military?

We'll see if that happens or not.

So the stocks recovered.

But the point was, the guy came out and said...

We're taking control of these private companies' capital allocation until they do what I say.

And then he comes out and says, and this one's even stupider, we're not going to let institutional investors buy houses anymore because it's making houses unaffordable.

And Blackstone is in that business and Invitation Homes, those stocks tank.

Right.

And never mind that they own a tiny percentage of the houses out there.