WSJ What’s News - Washington Tightens the Screws on Venezuela’s Maduro

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

A.M. Edition for Dec. 12. The U.S. is ramping up efforts to force Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro from power, by sanctioning his family members and oil tankers that provide critical revenue for his regime. Plus, the White House tries to rein in a surge of state AI regulations. And WSJ tech reporter Sam Schechner looks at how OpenAI’s latest ChatGPT update stacks up against competitors from Google and Anthropic. Luke Vargas hosts. Sign up for the WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Canada's Wonderland is bringing the holiday magic this season with Winterfest on select nights now through January 3rd. Step into a winter wonderland filled with millions of dazzling lights, festive shows, rides, and holiday treats. Plus, Coca-Cola is back with Canada's kindness community, celebrating acts of kindness nationwide with a chance at 100,000 donation for the winning community and a 2026 holiday caravan stop. Learn more at canadaswunderland.com. Washington tightens the screws on Venezuela's Maduro. Plus, the White House tries to rain in a surge of state AI regulations, and Paramount's Warner bid makes it clear. Wall Street's appetite for debt is back.

Right now, it's like the rainy season just happened. All the grasses are growing, and the population is booming, and everyone's feasting. It's Friday, December 12th. I'm Luke Vargas for the Wall Street Journal, and here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today. The U.S. is stepping up pressure on Venezuela's Nicholas Maduro, sanctioning some of his family members and six oil tankers. The Treasury Department said the targeted tankers had engaged in, quote, deceptive and unsafe shipping practices and continue to provide financial resources that fuel Maduro's corrupt narco-terrorist regime, end quote.

It follows the U.S. seizure of an oil tanker off Venezuela's coast earlier this week and comes as President Trump last night repeated his threat to soon begin strikes on suspected narcotic shipments making their way via land from Venezuela to the U.S. To Indiana now, where senators have rejected a congressional redistricting plan in a blow to President Trump. Trump has been pressuring Republican-controlled legislatures and GOP governors to adopt congressional maps under unusual mid-cycle rebuttal. redistricting plans in a bid to ensure the party retains control of the U.S. House after next year's midterms. Democratic State Senator Andrea Hunley and Republican State Senator Sue Glick both opposed the redistricting. There's been allowed of outside sources that were pressuring. But, you know, the Hoosiers prevailed today. I mean, their phone calls, their letters coming to the State House, their testimony showing up at town halls, it mattered. And legislators listened. I'm sure there's

going to be some frustration. There have been some comments made about things that may or may not have to happen for the state of Indiana as a result of the Senate's vote. But we shouldn't have to look over our shoulder at the federal government and say, you know, we didn't get this because somebody in Washington was upset with us. Other states, including Texas, North Carolina, and Missouri have approved redistricting that would benefit the GOP, while Democrats last month pushed through a similar plan in California to counter those efforts. President Trump is attempting to put a lid on state rulemaking efforts around AI, signing in executive order that empowers the Justice Department to punish states whose AI laws are deemed

too restrictive. Tech execs had lobbied for such a move, arguing that the proliferation of AI bills proposed at the state level, which now exceed 1,000, could cause the U.S. to lose out to China. In the Oval Office, Trump stressed the need to clear roadblocks for companies working on artificial intelligence. We have the big investment coming, but if they had to get 50 different approvals from 50 different states, you can forget it because it's not possible to do, especially if you have some hostile, all you need is one hostile actor, and you wouldn't be able to do it. Democrats and some of Trump's backers, including Steve Bannon and Republican Senator Josh Hawley have criticized the efforts to rein in state AI laws,

characterizing them as a giveaway to tech companies and saying they would undermine state efforts to protect consumers. Well, speaking of the AI race at the corporate level, OpenAI is rolling out a new version of ChatGPT as it tries to fend off mounting competition from Google and Anthropic. OpenAI said the new model dubbed GPT 5.2 was better at math, science, encoding, skills seen as critical if businesses are to see returns on their AI investments. Journal tech reporter Sam Shetner told me OpenAI needs to act fast to hold on to its early lead in AI adoption. Open AI has seen a lot of challenge lately from competitors.

You know, the chatbot race, which it ran away with early on and quickly and rose to 800 million users every week for chat GPT, is now super competitive. With this new model, OpenAI is really targeting business. users, we're talking about all the kinds of white-collar office work that people do on their computers. And actually, Open AI built its own metric for measuring how well an AI model does at these. They broke out economically valuable office tasks. And they actually rated this model against that. And so, I mean, take it with a grain of salt. It's their own metric. But they say that it performs far better than just even its previous version from a couple months ago. GPT comes as OpenAI races to release a new model by the end of January that can compete with Google's latest Gemini release.

Under the so-called Code Red efforts, OpenAI is hoping to make ChatGPT both more warm and personable for users and improve its speed and video generation capabilities. And Crypto Tycoon Doe-Quan has been sentenced to 15 years in prison on fraud charges related to the $40 billion crash of his Terra-USD and Luna-Corps. coins back in 2022. Kwan pleaded guilty to two charges back in August in exchange for federal prosecutors dropping seven other counts against him. In their closing arguments, prosecutors said that Kwan was driven by greed and arrogance and had lied repeatedly about the utility and safety of his products. At its peak in the spring of 2022, prosecutors said

the total market value of all the cryptocurrencies associated with Kwan's Terraform labs topped $50 billion, with their failures hurting hundreds of thousands of investors worldwide. Coming up, animal spirits are back on Wall Street, fueling a surge in massive deals. Plus, Rivian looks to take on Tesla with self-driving cars. We've got those stories and more after the break. Build, play, and display with the 3-1 Megablocks preschool sets. The building go race car revamps into a pickup truck and hot rod, and the build and enchant unicorn transforms into a puppy and Pegasus.

Each easy-to-build set comes with rolling wheels, 26 blocks, and easy-to-read building steps, compatible with other megablocks sets for endless big building fun. Shop 3-1 megablocks at Walmart for ages 3-plus. The Mega Deal is back. And so it seems is Wall Street's immense appetite for debt. Paramount's hostile bid for Warner Brothers discovery as well as other recent debt-laden transactions have all been possible thanks to a spike in lending. And as journal credit reporter Matt Wertz writes, that is making some investors nervous. Matt, before we get too into the weeds here, just talk us through these recent deals we've been seeing, especially those that have not just been cash offers.

and in fact, a number at least seem to have been very dependent actually on loans. Right. So what we are seeing is a boom in very large, what we call mega deals, which technically is over $10 billion in value, but we are seeing over $30 billion in value, over $40 billion in value, over $50 billion in value. So these are very big leveraged buyouts. They involve a lot of debt. And what the debt does is, first of all, allows the buyer to make a large,

offer, which is important in deals like Warner, where there's a bidding war going on. And the other thing it does is it potentially improves the return on their own equity investments. And we're seeing really just a boom in the last two to three months. We're seeing the bidding war on Warner between Paramount and Netflix, of course. We saw Silver Lakes bid for electronic arts, the video game studio. That involved a big check. from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund. We saw a massive deal BlackRock and a couple of other partners made for Aligned Data Centers. So we are really in the most recent heyday. The biggest deal boom we've seen, I would say, since 2015. And so, Matt, why is this occurring now? I mean,

going into 2025, we had seen several years in a row of declining M&A mega deals. Yeah, there's a couple of things. Like, one is obviously the Trump administration, right? These large deals, they often involve very large companies coming together. There are antitrust concerns with that and the Trump administration has indicated that they're going to be a little bit more play along with those kind of deals. Another thing is that private equity, which tends to be the fuel to the fire of these cyclical trends, they've been building up a lot of what they call dry powder. They just have a lot of money to spend. The other thing that we're seeing and this involves firms like Silver Lake is that we just have a lot of easy debt available again. Now, what's similar to past cycles is the banks are

lending again. They've had big profits. M&A is coming back. M&A drives a lot of fees for banks and they want to be involved. All right, Matt, and finally, what is the outlook here? Is this trend going to continue? I like the thing of this is kind of like the circle of life of Wall Street and capital markets where right now it's like the rainy season just happened. On the Serengeti, there's like all the all the grasses are growing and like the population is booming and everyone's feasting and there's a lot of things that are contributing to that and that leads to a lot of transactions some of which do very well but some of which particularly those that have a lot of debt if the market turns and so like if we go into a drought for example those deals

get harder to both execute so we could see some hiccups because these deals take a year or more to transact and then they could also not perform as expected once. they're done because they're being transacted in a market where everyone has very rosy expectations. And if the economy, for example, goes into a downturn or a sector has a change, like a new technology, like artificial intelligence, things might not work out as planned. Some indigestion after that feast on the Serengeti to push your analogy maybe a bit too far. I love it. Yeah, some full bellies and maybe some tummy eggs. Yeah. I've been speaking to Wall Street Journal credit reporter Matt Wirtz. Matt, thanks so much for the update.

Yeah, thank you. Well, let's turn to the UK now where an interest rate cut is increasingly on the cards after data this morning showed the economy unexpectedly shrank before last month's budget. A rate cut would be welcome news for property investors with the UK housing market having stalled this year. Yesterday, a closely watched survey from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors said that a pickup isn't expected until the spring selling season, with inflation and high interest rates hurting affordability. Meanwhile, shares in Lulu Lemon have soared off hours after the athletic gear maker announced that CEO Calvin McDonald will be stepping down in January. Growing competition meant net revenue in the Americas fell 2% last quarter,

with McDonald facing pressure from Lulu Lemon's founder to reverse its, quote, loss of cool. And beep-beep-beep Tesla, EV-maker Rivian is beefing up its autonomous driving features to stay relevant in a tough market for its trucks and SUVs. Chief Executive RJ Scourange said that later this month, Rivian cars on 3.5 million miles of North American roads would be able to drive hands-free, up from just 135,000 miles of highway today, and more changes are coming next year. Starting in 2026, we'll begin rolling out point-to-point capabilities in which the vehicle can drive address to address. It's what that means is you can get into the vehicle at your house, plug in the address to where you're going, and the vehicle

completely drive you there. With EV buyers no longer eligible for large federal tax credits, analysts at Morgan Stanley say the company needs to keep pace with Tesla's self-driving product, which has been on the roads for several years. Rivian's shares yesterday closed down 6%. And that's it for what's news for this Friday morning. Today's show was produced by Hattie Moyer and Daniel Bach. Our supervising producer is Sandra Kilhoff, and I'm Luke Vargas for the Wall Street Journal. We will be back tonight with a new show. Otherwise, have a great weekend, and thanks for listening.