Venezuela’s economic and political crisis continues to deepen, exacting a growing humanitarian toll and devastating an economy that was once Latin America’s most prosperous. With oil revenues falling and reserves exhausted, the government has been forced to slash basic services, ration food and medical supplies, and broker increasingly desperate financing deals to temporarily fend off an international debt default. While the government continues to use force and debase democratic institutions to contain dissent and maintain its hold on power, an eventual economic collapse seems inevitable.

In this talk, Robert Kahn, the Steven A. Tananbaum Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC, will discuss the current economic pressures on the government, the daunting array of economic and geopolitical challenges that will need to be addressed in any future rescue and rebuild efforts by the international community, and, finally, the impact that the resolution of this crisis could have on sovereign debt policy and on relations between important policy makers.