Looking at the amount these brokerage houses had left in their holdings it did not seem like that much. Bear Stearns is not doing that well and Goldman Sachs who knows what they are up to.

My point is that I am amazed that so many institutions are hanging in there. We are hyper analyzing this to the point that a puff of wind is a sign of who knows what.

That the stock is at rock bottom is nothing unusual since there is a huge problem here. I am more really amazed that GRZ management thinks it can turn things around and that they are even attempting to try. I am wondering what kind of assurances VZ can make when there does not seem to be any law guiding anything.

The srong suit that GRZ holds is that Vz has attempted to muscle in on something that is not built yet and therefore they cannot take it and all the drilling information is hopefully under lock and key in some cyber vault. Vz therefore cannot get to those tens of billions in minerals and they are stuck. They do not have the upper hand they think which is perhaps why this is not as cut and dry as the rest of the expropriations.

The other major miscalculation, and this is a really big one, is that Hugo never thought oil was going to come down like this. I think it is headed to a around $75 per barrel. This basically cuts him off at the knees . Never in a million years did he think oil was going to come down and stay down.

Vz is a one trick pony and that trick is oil. He is going into an election where his revenues are going down and his expenditures are going up. Now he is running around telling OPEC it must lower output to raise prices. Get this. He is telling OPEC basically that he needs more money and that for his convenience they need to raise prices. He is wanting to use the same tactics as within Vz. It won't happen.

It seems that Hugo has miscalculated. He cannot take anything that has not been built yet. He thinks like a military commander and he has really miscalculated this gambit. His secret weapon is faltering and he is in a corner. A few weeks ago he said oil was going to $300 when instead it is going to $75.00. This is a disaster. So Hugo now is weak and he does not know how to look strong. His ace in the hole oil is no longer an ace and he has nothing else producing wealth. Did you not read a few weeks ago that Sanz and Ortega openly said that they were broke and had no money in their budgets?

This gold mining thing is making him look very bad because it shows that he is impotent to do anything. The only answer is to give into the mining companies so something can get built. He does not like that. He can't sweep this under the rug because of constituency. He is basically in retreat.

How this gets resolved will be very interesting. It seems that Hugo has gone one expropriation too far and it will be his demise.