Donald Trump has embarked on an audacious power grab in Latin America with his military assault on Venezuela, and spoken apparently seriously of his “need” to gobble up Greenland too, in a bombastic start to 2026.
This is, fairly obviously, a big moment for the international rules-based order, and for the alliances within it. For financial markets, though, it is business as usual.
The price of oil, Venezuela’s prized asset, has barely budged and is still stuck close to five-year lows of around $60 a barrel. Shares in some US oil companies have popped higher over the expectation that they will step in to revamp Venezuela’s energy sector. Set aside the fact that they would need to spend billions of dollars on a creaking infrastructure riddled with security vulnerabilities to get their hands on oil in the country. Likewise, the fact that oil prices would probably fall further if Venezuelan production did indeed expand. These details are for another day. For now, oil is the sector of the stock market bathing in the warm glow of presidential approval, and that’s enough to give share prices a boost.