Michael Noel, an economics professor at Texas Tech University, joins CBS News 24/7 to discuss the Trump administration's deal with Venezuela, and if it will actually provide any relief at the gas pump.
Page F1From§Eachthe early bird edition — 31 August 2026
Trump touts Venezuela oil deal to cut gas prices; experts say don't expect changes anytime soon.
As it ran on the front
The filing says Venezuela. The pump says otherwise. On Sunday CBS asked whether the administration's new oil arrangement with Caracas would ease gas prices at the pump; by Tuesday the same network was quoting analysts who said, plainly, not anytime soon. Two segments, same desk, days apart, and the arithmetic between them is the story.
Let's run the numbers we do have. Retail gas has not moved on the announcement. What has moved is the press conference. The deal produces a headline before it produces a barrel that clears a U.S. refinery gate, and that sequencing — statement first, supply later, savings unscheduled — is not a bug in this administration's energy communications; it is the product line.…
…(cont) This is not a complaint about the deal's merits. Sanctions relief with Venezuela may, eventually, put more heavy crude into Gulf Coast refineries built to run it. Analysts on the same network that ran the 'will it work' segment say that supply chain takes months to reconfigure, not days, and that shipping and refining capacity, not diplomacy, sets the clock. None of that changes what was promised at the podium, which was relief, stated in the present tense, to voters checking a pump display in the present tense.
Reconciling the ledger: one announcement, one asterisk, zero dollars off a gallon so far. The gap between the promise and the receipt is the gap analysts are already describing on camera, paragraphs into the same coverage that ran the promise. That gap does not close itself, and it does not close on the timeline of a midterm cycle either, hon — it closes on the timeline of tankers, refinery contracts, and output decisions, none of which take instruction from a press release.
Who benefits from the gap staying open just a little longer, framed just optimistically enough? Not the driver. The driver pays the same regional number this week whether or not Caracas ships a single new barrel. The beneficiary of an announced-but-undelivered price drop is whoever needed the announcement more than the drop, and that is a question for a different desk. This one just runs the tape: promised Sunday, denied by experts Tuesday, price unchanged as of filing.
“They put a barrel of Venezuelan crude on TV before they put it in a tank, and everybody at this bar already knows the price at the pump answers to Wall Street and OPEC, not a press conference. Ask who needed the good headline this week — it wasn't the guy paying forty bucks to fill up.”
“Sanctions relief opens up heavy crude nobody's had access to in years, that's a win for consumers full stop — I mean, eventually, once refiners retool, which, okay, could take a while, so maybe not a win yet. But it's coming. Definitely coming.”
The receipts
The deal involves developing 17 strategic oil fields in Venezuela, an undertaking that experts said could take years.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.