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Russia’s apparent resilience is being kept up by policy tricks and cash

thetimes.co.uk

161–170 of 205 posts

Re: Russia’s apparent resilience is being kept up by policy tricks and cash

#161
post #104

The real losers are Europe.

Hello from Europe! While I agree that there really aren't any winners in a war from a humanitarian perspective, it really doesn't feel here like we are losing. I'm happy to pay a lot for electricity and gas if that means the Russian government will fall and their army will be reduced to shreds (although the gas prices right now are almost the same as they used to be before the war... ) Also to the US, this is an incr…

This means that you would like to see as many as possible Russian people killed.

You started the whole thing in order to plunder Russia, you are indeed monsters though you "think" you are innocent, and I hope you and above all your american lords, will get the Nurenburg tribunal you deserve for creating this war and the hatred for the Russian people to justify it.

Re: Russia’s apparent resilience is being kept up by policy tricks and cash

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not so sure about this. That a handful of aggressive and hungry Russo-Warlords with Nukes is any improvement over Putin. They will fight between them with their remaining soviet weapons, since they are not competent to fight any large country. Maybe some of those would actually become a democracy.

> They will fight between them with their remaining soviet weapons Says who? They can just as well harass non-Russian neighbouring states. Or quite likely form some kind of > since they are not competent to fight any large country That doesn't prevent them from trying though. > Maybe some of those would actually become a democracy. Democracy in such states is an illusion. You are either USA with sustainable, refined…

Да ну. A 2 party state is barely better than a 1 party state, and electors are a fancy way to circumvent 1 person 1 vote. It's deeply rooted mechanisms of something, but not exactly democracy )))

Re: Russia’s apparent resilience is being kept up by policy tricks and cash

#163
post #39
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a european, I think both of your "sources" seems dodgy and very US-libertarian biased (should I say Kremlin biased ?)

I'm not the GP and don't have a horse in this race, but is English Wikipedia widely considered "Kremlin biased?" That seems far fetched.

It was not wikipedia.

Re: Russia’s apparent resilience is being kept up by policy tricks and cash

#164
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh. I sometimes wonder how vulnerable the US would be to a squeeze appreciating USD. You could probably even get large parts of the US political class to go along with it, as (in the short term) they'd be benefiting relative to their countrymen.

Very invulnerable. This whole “Squeeze” thing is a function of liquidity. The reason that stocks like GME and AMC can experience the effects of a short squeeze is because of how relatively illiquid they are (i.e. point $1bn of consumer capital toward a $3bn stock with thin trading and you can do wild things). The USD is the currency in which nearly all middle eastern oil is priced, the currency in which $16tn of cons…

It has happened in the 80s though. Soros (for example) has written a lot about this phenomenon and traded extensively on it, making a small truckload of money. It peaked in early 1985: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/currency

It was bad for a lot of countries that had dollar-denominated debt, which is a bad idea precisely for this reason. Countries never learn though, it seems. But it was not too bad for the US actually.

Re: Russia’s apparent resilience is being kept up by policy tricks and cash

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no love for Russians in any of these countries; they'll just deport any refugees.

The Baltics probably would, but Georgia is literally swamped with Russian émigrés right now. By the Georgian official data, more than 100k Russians arrived in 2022 alone, which is 2-3% of the country's population.

Lithuania and Poland have been coordinating to keep the migrants coming in via Belarus out of their countries, although these are Middle Easterners and Africans. And all of the Baltics have placed a travel ban on Russians. I don't see them caring about the misfortune of Russians in such a scenario.

Re: Russia’s apparent resilience is being kept up by policy tricks and cash

#166
post #77

Do not ever forget what was promised: Russia in rubble in two weeks from sanctions and Russia out of missiles in two weeks. This was the "negotiated" social contract upon which quality of life in other parts of Europe was thrown into a dog shit trash fire. These kinds of articles are just not-so subtle cover for the once again failure of leaders here, and moving the goalposts and rewriting of history.

> Russia in rubble in two weeks from sanctions and Russia out of missiles in two weeks.

I'm not sure I ever heard such promises. In fact, I distinctly remember the opposite being the general zeitgeist of the time - that Russia would rollover Ukraine with little resistance.

Re: Russia’s apparent resilience is being kept up by policy tricks and cash

#167
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very invulnerable. This whole “Squeeze” thing is a function of liquidity. The reason that stocks like GME and AMC can experience the effects of a short squeeze is because of how relatively illiquid they are (i.e. point $1bn of consumer capital toward a $3bn stock with thin trading and you can do wild things). The USD is the currency in which nearly all middle eastern oil is priced, the currency in which $16tn of cons…

It has happened in the 80s though. Soros (for example) has written a lot about this phenomenon and traded extensively on it, making a small truckload of money. It peaked in early 1985: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/currency It was bad for a lot of countries that had dollar-denominated debt, which is a bad idea precisely for this reason. Countries never learn though, it seems. But it was not too bad for t…

No, not even close.

In 1985, Soros bet that the Plaza Accord (a market manipulation among a cartel of leading economies to weaken the dollar for political reasons) [1] would work and he was right.

That has nothing to do with shorts or squeezes and everything to do with collusion among the Treasuries and Central Banks of something like 75% of the world economy at that point.

Soros 'won' the trade because he realized how impactful this collusion would be while the rest of the market didn't.

[1]https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w21813/w218...

Re: Russia’s apparent resilience is being kept up by policy tricks and cash

#168
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has happened in the 80s though. Soros (for example) has written a lot about this phenomenon and traded extensively on it, making a small truckload of money. It peaked in early 1985: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/currency It was bad for a lot of countries that had dollar-denominated debt, which is a bad idea precisely for this reason. Countries never learn though, it seems. But it was not too bad for t…

No, not even close. In 1985, Soros bet that the Plaza Accord (a market manipulation among a cartel of leading economies to weaken the dollar for political reasons) [1] would work and he was right. That has nothing to do with shorts or squeezes and everything to do with collusion among the Treasuries and Central Banks of something like 75% of the world economy at that point. Soros 'won' the trade because he realized h…

Maybe you can answer a different question of mine: what, if anything, did Japan get out of the Plaza Accord? By weakening USD (and hence USD-denominated commodities?) West Germany got a strong DM and hence could LBO East Germany and reunify. Japan got a strong JPY and ... what, besides stagflation?

edit: am I calculating this right? to do a Plaza today would need, not the G5, but pretty much the entire G20?

Re: Russia’s apparent resilience is being kept up by policy tricks and cash

#169
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be so fun to be in IT in Russia right now. Software and film piracy is now completely legal because, if they aren’t selling it, it’s not theft. I could put pirated Windows on every workstation with no fear…

An unfortunate Russian citizen here. I left Russia in 2006, but the passport is still like an iron beam on my neck. And you would also get the exit ban. FYI, people who worked for Russian biggest banks are now banned from leaving the country, and that is not only IT, real bankers are banned from leaving as well. Owners of biggest commercial enterprises, and their children were also forbidden from leaving. Russian FOR…

You can easily buy cash in those small stores with surprisingly good exchange rates. Also I have converted my Rubels to Euros for months now on the stock market and sent them via Swift into an EU bank (in total above 10k€). So no problems there either. But the customs do question you rather aggressively about cash. Although he didn’t seem to believe me that I didn’t have cash with me, he didn’t search me either.

Re: Russia’s apparent resilience is being kept up by policy tricks and cash

#170
post #11

One reason that sanctions haven't had an apparent immediate effect is that the Russian economy was already in a slow downward spiral. The Russian economy peaked in 2013 and has been going down hill since then. The Russian society has already been hardened by these 9 years of "hard times" and not to forget the much harder times in the 1990s. Another reason is that Western companies stopped their sales in Russia while…

It would be so fun to be in IT in Russia right now. Software and film piracy is now completely legal because, if they aren’t selling it, it’s not theft. I could put pirated Windows on every workstation with no fear…

A friend told me how their Adobe licenses got revoked, but the company just imaged the working version and disabled Internet access for anything Adobe related - it works, but it also means no AI tools or further updates for now. I doubt there will be straight out pirated versions of most products, especially because of the rootkits floating around.

Office 365 cancellations are another story. Lots of movement to onprem or relocations of IT abroad are in progress right now. Yandex for example is moving part of it’s operations to Israel.

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