In the aftermath of OPEC’s failure to cut oil production, Russia has been acting surprisingly sanguine, perhaps as a result of less leverage in its system as compared to America’s own high yield-funded shale complex – now that it is a race to who will default first and be forced to take production offline – with Putin today saying “Russia will cope with the rout in crude oil”,  and adding that “we are satisfied overall with the situation and do not see anything so extraordinary in what is happening. Winter is coming and I am sure that the market will come into balance again in the first quarter or toward the middle of next year.” Maybe it will, or maybe not, if indeed as those with a working frontal cortex suggest the plunge in crude prices is merely a function of a collapse in global demand now that the worldwide slowdown which has gripped Japan, Europe and China. In that case, the race to the bottom between Russia with its higher cash costs, and the US shale sector, loaded to the gills with billions in junk bonds, will be an epic one to watch.

But one country whose fate is now virtually assured – with a happy ending now sadly out of the picture – is the same one that stormed out furious at Thursday’s failure by OPEC’s cartel members to carve out a consensus leading to higher oil prices: Venezuela.

Here pretty much everything is about to go unhinged, with what now looks like an almost inevitable sovereign default as the endgame, coupled with the removal of a few million barrels of oil from the global supply chain, something which all the other OPEC members will be delighted by.

For confirmation one can merely look at the Venezuela bolivar, which earlier Friday fell to a record low of 150.76 VEF/USD on the black market according to dolartoday.com, which tracks rate at Colombian border, and as reported by Bloomberg.. Indicatively, the official rate is 6.3 VEF/USD; the first unofficial rate, that’s based on Sicad I, is 12 VEF/USD, while the second unofficial rate, per Sicad II, is 50 VEF/USD.