Paul Krugman on Wednesday attempted to burst the bubble on what he dubbed President Donald Trump’s “black, sticky fantasy” of making serious money from Venezuela’s oil reserves.

The 2008 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences noted in the new issue of his Substack newsletter how Trump, during a press conference after the seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by U.S. military forces, repeatedly said the word “oil” while boasting about somehow taking it back.

Read Krugman’s full analysis on Substack.

But “the vast wealth Trump imagines is waiting there to be taken doesn’t exist,” suggested Krugman, one of Trump’s most persistent economic critics during both his terms.

Krugman cited the barriers to the potential riches that Trump has talked up to his MAGA base: question marks over the actual size of Venezuela’s reserves, the “extra-heavy” nature of the oil and the high production cost of processing much of it.

The president’s “belief that he has captured a lucrative prize in Venezuela’s oil fields would be an unrealistic fantasy” even if he really was running the country, Krugman concluded.