Oil Gains But Investors Downplay U.S. Extracting Maduro From Venezuela

Analysts weigh in on what a U.S.-controlled Venezuela will mean for global oil: File Image/Pixabay

Despite its geopolitical impact and implications, investors on Monday downplayed  the U.S.'s capture of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro as oil prices rose along with stocks and energy shares.

Brent settled up $1.01at $61.76 per barrel, while West Texas Intermediate settled up $1 at $58.32.

This was accompanied by record highs for The Dow Jones Industrial Average; the S&P 500 energy index rising to its highest since March 2025, with shares of Exxon Mobil up 2.2 percent and Chevron up 5.1 percent; and an S&P index of defense shares up more than 1 percent.

Although U.S. president Donald Trump putting Venezuela under temporary American control and threatening Colombia and Mexico over the weekend caused divided reactions worldwide, Oliver Pursche, senior vice president, advisor at Wealthspire Advisors, said, "It's a reasonable reaction from the markets to largely ignore the geopolitics around Venezuela, with the exception of a handful of oil companies, which are spiking.

"Venezuela's GDP has virtually no impact on global GDP... so the market should ignore it."

Trump told media that investment in Venezuela's energy assets was now a core objective: "We're going to have our very large United States oil companies — the biggest anywhere in the world — go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure."

Allen Good, director of equity research at Morningstar, said Chevron was the best-positioned oil major to benefit from an investment in Venezuela's assets and that Exxon and ConocoPhillips could re-enter the country but that it would take "tens of billions" of dollars to boost production and that "Oil companies will need to be cautious about deploying capital until there is greater regulatory and contractual certainty."

Neil Atkinson, an independent energy analyst and former employee of Venezuela's state-owned oil company PDVSA, told CNBC that stability and law and order would be required to overhaul the country's oil industry, "Which there isn't now; you have to ensure that there is stable electricity supplies, which there isn't now; you have to ensure that food and fuel supplies are reliable, where they are not now; so, a lot has to happen and it cannot happen without the consent of the Venezuelan people."

Derek Holt, head of capital markets economics at Scotiabank, wrote in a report Monday that "American hubris thinks it can restore order and run the country with a compliant local administration," but past forays into Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere suggested otherwise.

Despite shares in Canada's biggest oilsands producers coming under pressure Monday due to Washington's extraction of Maduro, Holt cautioned against concluding "that this will unleash a torrent of new supply on world markets with effects that allegedly include snowing under Canada's oil industry."

Finally, Another possible consequence of the U.S. controlling Venezuelan oil assets was voiced by Jordan Rochester, an analyst at Mizuho Bank, who said, "By controlling Venezuela, the U.S. doesn't need to own the oil, it just needs a hand on the tap.

"This shapes global energy flows and decides whether China gets cheap heavy crude or has to pay market rates elsewhere."