A couple years ago, I asked a friend with ties to the Venezuelan émigré community if there was a betting pool on the date the Venezuelan regime would fall and he said most Venezuelans have shortened index fingers from tapping on the table going, “Today! This is the day the regime falls!” Which shows both that political predictions are unreliable and wishful thinking often dominates forecasting (as with oil prices).
That the Maduro regime has confounded expectations of regime change does not tell us too much about its political future. My favorite political risk anecdote concerns a group of foreign bankers visiting Teheran in late 1978 to arrange a multi-billion dollar loan to the Shah’s government.
