The Editor's Desk - Mon 5 Jan 2026: Trump’s Venezuela gamble and 10 trends for 2026

We kick off the new year analysing the US military’s shock move in Caracas, Ruchir Sharma’s warning on the AI bubble, and what these global shifts mean for your portfolio..PS. You can book tickets for the inaugural NdB Liberty Indaba by clicking here. And you can book tickets for the post BNC#8 golf day sponsored by Shyft, by clicking here..Don't miss out on future episodes of The Editor's Desk. Subscribe to BizNews Premium and get the podcast delivered to your inbox daily..Listen here.Read the full transcript of The Editor's Desk podcast below.You've seen the headlines on BizNews.com, watched and listened to the interviews on BizNews TV and BizNews Radio. So now, let's talk about what the latest developments mean for your money.This is the Editor's Desk, exclusive analysis for BizNews Premium members. Today is Monday, the 5th of January, 2026. I called it 2025 on the Daybreak Show this morning, but oh well, cut me a break. You do tend to forget that you've moved on a year, especially if you're rubbing the sleep out of your eyes at 5am. I'm really glad to have you with me.Talking about that 5am start, there's been a really good response to our Daybreak show. What happens is that every morning I get up well before the crack of dawn and provide the latest overnight news and a summary of what happened in South Africa the day before. Not "news news," but context on what's going on. It's called the BizNews Daybreak. It is a podcast.We also reproduce the podcast on our YouTube channel. So, you can get it if you prefer on BizNews TV, but be aware there are no pictures there. There are no talking heads or any kind of images. It's just a radio signal kind of thing. That is done specifically so that we can get the news to you as soon as possible in the morning. The real intention is quite obvious.Most people listen to audio on their way into the office. It is a tradition in South Africa that began when radio was introduced and the highways got clogged up. The "morning drive," as it's called in the radio industry, accounts for—or used to anyway—well over 50% of the audiences of the day.It’s a little bit like a hill. You get to the top of the hill by about 7:30 or 8 o’clock in the morning, and then it starts declining. That's what happens to radio listenership. The same thing applies to audio. As we know, the old "by appointment" listening and viewing is now very much on the way out. We now have a situation where it's on-demand. What that means is we prefer to consume our media—and certainly the broadcast media, audio and visual—when we want to watch it or when we want to hear it, not when some radio station or television station would like to give it to us.That's what we're doing with the Daybreak. We're giving it to you in good time for your morning drive into work. That is why there are no pictures included when you go onto BizNews TV, so please don't expect any there.I would suggest that you, as a Premium member, join the WhatsApp channels or just double-check your WhatsApp interactive channel options so that you can follow the debates that are going on there. They are vibrant and they've continued all the way through December. There's no rest, it seems, for those of us who are fixated by the news cycle. You’ll find the latest update there and, of course, in the BizNews Daily Insider newsletter. This is distributed a little later than we used to—it used to go out at 5am, but it now includes the BizNews Daybreak links, so we do our best efforts to get that to you about 6:30am.Okay, what are we talking about on the Editor's Desk today?Well, it is a new year—Happy New Year! If I haven't told you this or suggested it to you already, 2026 is going to be quite a year. We've already seen an extraordinary kickoff with Donald Trump sending in his Marines. We’re not absolutely sure yet how the whole military exercise was conducted, but something like 150 aircraft were used in it, and a half-dozen Marines—or troops—are being given the credit for snatching Nicolás Maduro and his wife from their palace in the middle of Caracas and taking them back to the United States, where they are now facing charges on drug-related issues.It's not the first time that the Americans have done this. In fact, a hundred years ago, they had something called the Monroe Doctrine, which said that any issues that happen with governments in the Western Hemisphere—in other words, North and South America—they reserve the right as a nation legally to go in and, well, address them. The most recent example of this was with General Noriega, you might recall, and Nicaragua a couple of decades ago. So, it's not unprecedented, but it has sent shockwaves through the world.Here we have a President in the United States who was well known around the trading floors as the "Taco Man"—Trump always chickens out. Well, with a smaller country like Venezuela and with a strong motivation, as Donald Trump clearly has in this case, there's no taco involved here. He sent in the Marines and that was it.There is an excellent piece on BizNews today from our partners at The Economist, which looks into it. They have been covering this really well and we have published a couple of pieces on BizNews on this topic. But the latest focus of The Economist's team is on what they call "Donald Trump's great Venezuelan oil gamble." You'll find the article on BizNews.com today.It goes back to the sense of vengeance, to a degree, that Trump exuded in his initial statements. This refers to 18 years ago when Nicolás Maduro's predecessor and mentor, Chávez, nationalised assets belonging to US and Western companies worth $60 billion back then. So you can imagine that the owners of those assets have been smarting. They get a businessman in the White House, they impress upon him that this is an illegitimate regime, and they get his buy-in that if Venezuela were to return to health, the country as a whole would be a different place.Of course, here in South Africa, we are seeing outrage, not just from the ANC, but extremely so from the EFF, where there is a great love for Chávez and the National Democratic Revolution—or their version of it, called the Bolivarian Revolution. As a consequence, it’s not surprising to see statements coming out from the EFF and their partner—if not in wearing the same clothes, but their philosophical partner—Jacob Zuma's MK Party, both of whom are outraged at the American action.It's good to remember, though, that South Africa is really a mosquito in the global environment. When the great powers start getting active, it's usually in the best interests of the little ones to just stay on the sidelines. Or if you're going to bet on one side or the other, be pretty sure that you're making the right bet. That's what I covered in Boardroom Talk this week. That podcast is up on BizNews Radio and the transcript is on BizNews.com as well.Getting back to The Economist story, Venezuela's oil production is down from around three million barrels a day before Chávez decided to nationalise the assets of the international companies, to around a million barrels a day. This is really scary for the population of Venezuela because the country has the biggest oil reserves in the world by some margin, bigger even than Saudi Arabia. In fact, it has got one-fifth of total oil reserves on this planet Earth, just in that little area. That means that Venezuela should be one of the wealthiest countries on Earth. Its population should be the happiest. But the Bolivarian Democratic Revolution has actually made them one of the most unhappy, with more than seven million Venezuelans having left the country because it's impossible to live there.Poverty has shot through the roof; from being the richest country in South America, it's now one of the poorest. And well, we have people in South Africa who want to repeat what's happening there. The responsibility truly does vest on those of us who do read and who do remain informed to understand exactly what's going on in Venezuela. We need to explain things like The Economist tells us: that to just get Venezuela back to where it was 15 years ago—let alone to become the preeminent oil producer in the world—is going to take a lot of time and $110 billion in capital expenditure. Now, we know capital is cowardly, and unless there's stability and a guarantee that you won't have another Bolivarian Revolution just around the corner, that $110 billion ain't going to get in there. It's a great story and well worth reading on the site.In a similar vein, another must-read is by Ruchir Sharma, who has looked at the top 10 trends for 2026. Of all the hundreds, if not thousands, of commentators who provide their forecasts, why should we highlight something from Ruchir Sharma? He is the author of the bestselling Breakout Nations, a book that is prescribed reading at business schools and certainly has been recommended to me by many people whose views I respect. If only Pretoria were to have that as a prescribed work, well, we might be in a different place. But it is what it is. You can't force people who don't read to start reading and educating themselves, particularly if they are aligned with a particular ideology.Again, in my Boardroom Talk this week, I said ideology is expensive. It is a bit like that lovely saying: if you think education is expensive, try ignorance. But back to Ruchir Sharma; he is a well-respected investor, bestselling author, and a global strategist. He's also the chair of Rockefeller International. He writes for the Financial Times from time to time, and we tend to republish and license those articles. As a Premium member, you've probably come across his name before, but this is one of his best pieces.Of those 10 trends, I'm not going to mess up your enjoyment, but there are a few that I'd like to highlight. The first one worth looking at is his view on the AI bubble. He says that the artificial intelligence stocks bubble is now ticking all the boxes, and not in a good way. He says that the bursting of the bubble is going to require liquidity drying up. It's not that Sharma tells us that AI stocks are going to continue rising indefinitely, but he says that they're in danger territory. Were we to see some external shock to the US system, or indeed interest rates no longer being cut but being increased, then that'll be a signal that will probably end the bubble. He gives some very good examples of how this has happened with other bubbles in the past, going way back to 1720 with the South Sea Bubble when the Netherlands banks decided to cut off credit.Another big trend he talks about is the way that foreigners are really on the edge when it comes to supporting the United States economy. Last year, they injected $1.7 trillion into the US, enough alone to cover the deficits there and the trade deficits the US has with the rest of the world. Again, he says the problem is once this reverses. So, some big, big red flags—go and read it and get your own insights.On the upside, the good news is quality stocks had their worst year since 2004 in terms of relative performance on the US markets last year. The view that Sharma gives us is that quality stocks will make a comeback in 2026.He also warns about the dumping by China of its products in global markets. This is a big issue in trade, and particularly for us here in South Africa. We've aligned ourselves very strongly with Beijing for reasons best known to those in Pretoria. Beijing has been dumping all over the world because it's no longer enjoying the access it used to have into the United States. It makes sense: you're producing a heck of a lot of stuff, you've got problems in your own economy which is slowing down fast, and you have a big population with lots of unemployed people that you need to keep happy. So you look for markets outside of the United States.South Africa is a tiny market—under a quarter of a percent of global GDP, whereas the US is sitting at 26%. It just puts into perspective how small we are in the global picture. However, although we're a small market, we were a pretty easy one to get into because we have a very friendly government as far as Chinese business is concerned. That is an issue that we in South Africa should be taking seriously. Ruchir Sharma looks into that in some detail.On politics, he makes the very strong assertion based on the trends that South America is moving to the right. Already Argentina, Chile, and Ecuador voted for conservative leaders. This year, it's likely to see Peru and Colombia go the same route. But the big one, of course, is Brazil. There, the popular Lula—the left-wing leader who you may recall went to prison on corruption charges not that long ago—has got a very strong opponent in one of the governors there who is more conservative. It will be interesting to see how that develops. The point is: go and read the piece. It's on BizNews and it's excellent.Finally, for your reading matter today, there's a particularly good piece about the UK. Many of us know the UK, and some of us have even lived there; it has very close links to South Africa. The bemusement for those of us who have been closer to that country is: how are they going to continue to fund the social benefits—which are extreme—if they have an ever-growing base of recipients, alongside a backlash towards immigration, which provides the people who are actually funding it?What I mean by that is simple. It's an ageing population, and as people get older, they use more of the national resources on their health. The UK has the NHS (National Health Service), which our dear friends in the ANC want to try and repeat in South Africa. Be that as it may, the big issue in the recent past is that more people died in 2015 than were born. It's a shrinking population. The Conservative government after COVID made up for this by opening the borders, primarily to Ukrainians and people from Hong Kong in 2023, and they had a net migration gain of about a million people that year.But that's now contracting. Last year, or in the 12 months to the end of June according to this piece, there were only 204,000 net immigrants into the UK. That's not enough to balance the books. What happens is people come into the workforce and contribute high taxes, which fund the social benefits for the older people. Now the older cohort is swelling, whereas Nigel Farage is politically supported by an ever-growing number of people who say "stop the immigration." They don't quite join the dots: if you don't have immigrants, and your working pool is contracting, how are you going to pay for this expanding group of people who take out of the pot? Somebody is going to have to join the dots at some point. It's a piece on BizNews that is well worth a look.Also on the site, Chris Steyn had an interview earlier this morning with Jonathan Deal, who's always very popular in the community. And then we have a piece from The Daily Friend where Helen Zille has investigated City Power and the way that City Power was fawning over Cyril Ramaphosa's foreign guests for the G20, but continuing to abuse the locals in Johannesburg who actually pay the bills. She says that City Power is held together by duct tape. Well, she knows she's got a big job ahead if she were to become Mayor in 11 months' time.I'm going to leave it there for today. Keep an eye on your Premium newsletter for links to the freshest published content. Thanks for trusting us with your time. I'm Alec Hogg.Until tomorrow. Cheerio.

The Editor's Desk - Mon 5 Jan 2026: Trump’s Venezuela gamble and 10 trends for 2026

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