Oil Stocks' Venezuela Rally, Maduro Heads to Court, Versant Media's Debut 1/5/26

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Jim Cramer (0:59)

It's Jim Cramer here. You're listening to the opening bell of CNBC's Squawk on the Street. Don't miss a minute of the action.

Carl Quintanilla (1:06)

Good Monday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with Jim Cramer, David Faber at Post 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. We kick off the first full week of trading of the year. Futures, as you can see, pretty steady. Market gets its first chance to react to the US strike on Venezuela. Congress returns to work. CES kicks off. Oil is up about 1%. Our roadmap begins with a fallout from the president's military intervention in Venezuela. Gold, Bitcoin, oil companies rallying in early trade.

David Faber (1:33)

The price of crude is also edging higher as Nicolas Maduro's removal casts uncertainty over Venezuela's massive oil reserves. We're going to discuss where prices may go from here. And CNBC's parent company, Versant Media, set to begin trading as a new independent media company today. This, of course, after being spun off from our long time parent, Comcast. Bye bye, Comcast.

Carl Quintanilla (1:59)

Let's begin though with these US strikes on Venezuela over the weekend, which resulted in the capture of that country's president, Nicolas Maduro, and puts the oil markets in center stage. Today Maduro was brought to Manhattan in handcuffs by DEA agents ahead of a federal court hearing later today. He is facing narco-terrorism, conspiracy, cocaine importation, and weapons charges. So much already written over the weekend, Jim, about what this means for risk, for foreign policy, for commodities.

Jim Cramer (2:29)

Right. Well, I think that the commodities are taking action immediately, but it's not oil. Oil is kind of trying to figure out what to do. I do think that we have to look at the fact that we do not want to immediately jump to the conclusion that we're going to untapple those reserves, and the reserves happen to be, as they call, VIN. They VIN heavy crude, which can be refined in the US and fine in China.

SPEAKER_6 (2:50)

Largely heavy crude.

Jim Cramer (2:51)

Right.

David Faber (2:52)

And you can say... Not all, I'm told.

Jim Cramer (2:53)

But you can say, look, Chevron has a toehold in there. They get 100,000 barrels per day, but I think that Chevron is up 12 to 1 point. I think that you can get excited about these things. The only guys who are really going to make some money, I think, would be Halliburton, because you've got to rebuild everything.

David Faber (3:10)

Everything, everything.

Jim Cramer (3:11)

If people don't recognize it, you have to rebuild.

David Faber (3:13)

And what's really, yeah, I was able to have a conversation with somebody who was in the country around two years ago. There was a brief period, if you guys recall, where sanctions came off as a result of the hopes that they would hold a fair election, which of course they didn't.

Jim Cramer (3:25)

Did not.

David Faber (3:25)

This was under the Biden administration. And the report is that the reserves are massive. We all know that.

Jim Cramer (3:31)

Right.

David Faber (3:31)

As you just indicated as well. Jaw dropping is geology is sort of what the terms that are used, what might be available there, largest potential reserves in the world. But in the near term, they can only increase production a little bit. Everything would need to be replaced, I'm told. I mean, from every single pipeline on down. You know, they cannibalize the pumps, they cannibalize the pipelines, there are no spare parts, everything's full of rust. This is somebody who actually looked at the infrastructure not that long ago. The amount of maintenance needed, it would just go on forever in terms of what they would need to do. And they basically stole in all the infrastructure, the current regime and those associated with them. So you would need to go foot...