Plenty of international media have pushed claims that the Venezuelan government is on the brink of default, but how many have done so AND provided readers with an interactive calculator so they can make up their own data about Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA?

That’s what Reuters did in this article by Marianna Parraga and Daniel Bases (based in New York and Houston)

The headline is “Venezuela may have missed $24 billion in oil revenue in 2014”.

Wow. Did the Venezuelan government misplace $24 billion in oil revenue somewhere?

The first paragraph said PDVSA “failed to collect” a third of its revenue in 2014 as if PDVSA had been stiffed by customers. Read a few paragraphs in and you’ll (kind of) learn that Venezuela repays loans to China (primarily) through oil shipments. By Reuters’s estimate (but feel free to make up your own numbers as the authors want us to for some reason) $14 billion, 60% of the “missing” revenue went to China, and another $4 billion went “missing” in the Caribbean region. As explained here, shipments to Cuba have been paid for, probably at a huge profit to poor Venezuelans, in the form of medical services from tens of thousands of Cuban doctors. However, to Reuters this is clear cut example of Venezuela “depriving itself” of oil revenue.

The article says

The fact that the country holds the world’s largest proven crude reserves has generally persuaded investors that it can afford to service its debts, in spite of Caracas’ rhetoric lambasting capitalist imperialism.

That confidence is eroding amid the collapse in oil prices and the crumbling of the state-led economic model, resulting in prices on sovereign and quasi-sovereign U.S. dollar-denominated debt dropping to levels typically associated with a default.

The default hype started in September of 2014 BEFORE oil prices unexpectedly dropped by half, but make up your own facts if you want to keep the default hype going. It isn’t like anybody will be held accountable for making stuff up about Venezuela.

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PS: Punching random numbers into a calculator isn’t as fun as I remember it being when I was eight.

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