Arthur Hayes argues that the US move to take control of Venezuelan oil is less about geopolitics than electoral math, and that the resulting policy mix of higher nominal growth and contained energy costs is structurally bullish for Bitcoin and high-beta crypto.
In a January 6 essay Titled “Suavemente,” the BitMEX co-founder frames the current moment through a deliberately simple lens: American politicians optimize for re-election, and the average voter optimizes for perceived economic well-being. “The question is: Does the US colonization of Venezuela cause the Bitcoin/crypto number to go up or down?” Hayes writes.
Hayes’s core claim is that US political control is determined at the margins, and that those margins respond overwhelmingly to the economy and inflation, especially “food and energy” inflation. “Above all, the economy is the only issue the average voter cares about,” he writes. “It’s easy to pump up the economy, and by that I mean nominal GDP. That’s just a matter of how much credit Trump can create.”
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But Hayes insists the same playbook could backfire if inflation follows, especially at the pump. “The most important benchmark for Americans is the price of gasoline,” he writes, arguing that limited public transportation makes gas prices a daily referendum on economic management. In that context, Venezuela’s value is clear: suppress the oil, suppress the gasoline and keep the promise of ‘run the economy hot’ intact without causing voter resistance.
He emphasizes what he calls a “10% rule”: “when the national average price of gasoline rises 10% or more in the three months preceding an election from the average price in January of the same calendar year, control of one or more branches of government changes teams.” This dynamic creates, he says, two regimes that are important for the markets: nominal GDP/credit up with oil up, or nominal GDP/credit up with oil flat down.
Why Bitcoin ‘wins’ if oil remains under control
Hayes’ bullish conclusion rests on the idea that oil prices limit the sustainability of money printing, not the operation of Bitcoin itself. “Because of the energy used to run computers engaged in proof-of-work mining, Bitcoin is the purest monetary abstraction there is,” he writes. “Therefore, the price of energy is irrelevant to the price of Bitcoin, as all miners will simultaneously experience a parallel shift up or down in the price. The price of oil only matters in terms of its ability to force politicians to stop printing money.”
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In his design, the stress signals come from the macro markets: the yield on ten-year government bonds and the MOVE index, a measure of the volatility of the bond markets. He argues that when oil prices rise far enough to push interest rates “close to 5%,” volatility increases, debt burdens decline and policymakers are forced to pivot.
Hayes points to an earlier episode as a template for reflexivity: “Remember, Trump threatened tariffs that were so high… the markets slumped and the MOVE index spiked to an intraday high of 172. The next day after the peak… Trump ‘paused’… the tariffs, and the markets bottomed out and then recovered violently.”
Without that stress, Hayes’ base case is an aggressive credit expansion with oil “fading if not outright falling,” which he ties directly to Bitcoin’s uptrend. He cites his “USD Liquidity Condition Index” as evidence that Bitcoin’s trend is following the liquidity of the dollar, concluding: “As the number of dollars increases, the price of Bitcoin and certain cryptos will skyrocket.”
The essay also reads like a positioning memo. Hayes says his fund, Maelstrom, has entered 2026 with “near maximum risk,” low dollar-stable exposure and the intention to rotate: “To achieve outperformance against BTC and ETH, I will sell BTC to fund privacy positions and sell ETH to fund DeFi.” He calls Zcash (ZEC) the “privacy beta” and says the fund is “already a lot of that” as of Q3 25.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin was trading at $93,841.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com