On September 5, the highly-respected Venezuelan economist Ricardo Hausmann, writing with his colleague Miguel Angel Santos, threw a bomb into the sovereign-debt world with an excellent, trenchant column headlined “Should Venezuela Default?” The column sparked a major international war of words: Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, gave a speech calling Hausmann a “financial hitman” and “outlaw”, while Hausmann, in turn, told Bloomberg News that Maduro’s speech was “the despotic diatribe of a tropical thug.” Fun times!

I suspect, however, that maybe Maduro was protesting just a little bit too much, and that he was annoyed mainly because Hausmann hit very close to the mark. Note the timing, here: Maduro didn’t respond immediately, he only responded after Reuters broke the news that Venezuela has hired Lazard to sell all of its assets in the US, including Citgo.

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