Post: #151

Oil prices are slightly up and the ruble appears to be stabilizing around $60.

Post: #152

(12-17-2014 01:27 PM)VolandoVengoVolandoVoy Wrote:  How would this affect an American making a visit to SPB or Moscow with game as a primary goal? Wouldn't it be a net plus, potentially making the real hotties more accessible? If a girl is stressed or depressed that can often make her crave stimulation, distraction, new experiences, particularly with someone exotic who offers a window to a different world.
I can see how it would cause some resentment and potentially make being buddy buddy with some guy at the bar more difficult, but that wouldn't bother me as long as I didn't get beaten or stabbed by some ultra nationalist.

It will take some time, but many of the expats are leaving or will leave soon. Less will also be moving here. This foreigner vacuum will be partially offset by opportunists who want to visit Russia at a discount.
So I see three scenarios for someone wanting to come meet girls:

- They'll view you with increased interest, because many of the foreigners they knew have left, and they're not meeting as many when they go out. They may also, like some of my students, assume that you've got lots of valuable dollars to throw around.

- They'll view you with increased hostility. Your country caused this or contributed to this and now they can't afford their vacation or the new iphone (or worse) as a result.

- They'll remain indifferent, despite a bruised ego.

I do think that much of the allure of foreigners, specifically American, is now gone among the general population here. With girls, it'll be a case by case basis as usual, just more pronounced.

Post: #153

(12-17-2014 01:37 PM)presidentcarter Wrote:  

(12-17-2014 01:27 PM)VolandoVengoVolandoVoy Wrote:  How would this affect an American making a visit to SPB or Moscow with game as a primary goal? Wouldn't it be a net plus, potentially making the real hotties more accessible? If a girl is stressed or depressed that can often make her crave stimulation, distraction, new experiences, particularly with someone exotic who offers a window to a different world.
I can see how it would cause some resentment and potentially make being buddy buddy with some guy at the bar more difficult, but that wouldn't bother me as long as I didn't get beaten or stabbed by some ultra nationalist.

It will take some time, but many of the expats are leaving or will leave soon. Less will also be moving here. This foreigner vacuum will be partially offset by opportunists who want to visit Russia at a discount.
So I see three scenarios for someone wanting to come meet girls:

- They'll view you with increased interest, because many of the foreigners they knew have left, and they're not meeting as many when they go out. They may also, like some of my students, assume that you've got lots of valuable dollars to throw around.

- They'll view you with increased hostility. Your country caused this or contributed to this and now they can't afford their vacation or the new iphone (or worse) as a result.

- They'll remain indifferent, despite a bruised ego.

I do think that much of the allure of foreigners, specifically American, is now gone among the general population here. With girls, it'll be a case by case basis as usual, just more pronounced.

Would it be better to say you were Canadian or British or is that all the same to them?

Post: #154

(12-17-2014 01:54 PM)VolandoVengoVolandoVoy Wrote:  Would it be better to say you were Canadian or British or is that all the same to them?

Better to be honest in this situation. That's splitting hairs really. They're going to view all of them with the same general opinion. Maybe America more as the root cause and the others as pawns or lesser evils.

Post: #155

This whole situation really gets me thinking about Bitcoin and how it could solve so many problems with private central banks... Maybe not exactly Bitcoin but a decentralized currency of some sort.

Post: #156

Theres not going to be war and the country won't be collapsing anytime soon.
The important sanctions against Russia will probably be lifted by summer 2015, as the EU doesn't want to keep them on going. Capital flight would limit because it would unprofitable to convert the ruble to euro/usd and take the money out of Russia, meaning that the Russian economy will have more money in circulation. Businesses will be closing, and foreign businesses will be staying out of the country; but the bad situation will probably start to stabilise towards the end of 2015.

Russians aren't made of the same cloth as modern day Americans and Brits. Even their millennial generation grew up during hard financial times through the 90s, let alone their parents. I see this as America basically showing Russia who is boss, as a collapsed Russia will have too much of a devastating effect on the international sphere of politics, we are not talking about Yugoslavia here.

Politically, Putin's position seems to strengthen, I actually think there will probably be riots, if a moderate government came in that appeared to be too pro Western, now after these sanctions. Also if you were to have riots and mass demonstrations on the streets, the police in Moscow are more well equipped and beefed up to deal with it. If Russia was to collapse, it would have been during the Yeltsin era when GDP dropped around 46%, Russian GDP at the moment has dropped by 4%; even during the 2008 recession there was a 8% drop in GDP.

I back up what DaveR is saying in regards to foreigners in Russia. If you invest a lot in the culture, language, country, you probably will be in a very good position. But I think the standard expat culture seen in Moscow, with expats crowded together in Salsa bars probably will be something that belonged in the past.

Post: #157

Major announcement tomorrow by Putin.

I'm calling it now: he's putting Russia on the gold standard.

Post: #158

^^ That would be a great early Christmas present.

Here's some good stuff. Someone on the forum linked to this site about 2 months ago and it's great for people who are interested in Russia.

http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2014/1...ional.html

Quote: The Bankster International
by Mark Hackard

Geopolitical analysis, the art of explaining power relationships through the prism of impersonal geography, can be a helpful tool for observers of the Great Game – but it also has its limitations. A case in point is the renewed US-Russia confrontation. Think tanks and policy insiders easily sell the narrative that from the dark days of the Cold War to our own time, Russia and the United States are fated to play in a zero-sum contest for the future of Eurasia and the world.

Deterministic theories, though, can be used to legitimize predatory policy, and pseudo-scientific formulae often conceal manipulations by parasitic elites. Scoring a fortune off human misery and mass death, plundering economic assets, and shaping entire societies in one’s own image all find justification in claims of historical inevitability and the necessity of “progress.”

While Russia and the United States can easily be cast as eternal enemies in the manner of Rome and Carthage, or Ivan Drago and Rocky Balboa for modern audiences, we should recall that the two states were originally allies. From the time of 1776, Russo-American friendship was a contributor to the peace and security of both nations for nearly a century and a half. Catherine the Great shrewdly supported the independence of the American colonists, who were able to mount a successful rebellion against an exploitative oligarchy acting through the British Crown. In the terrible cauldron of the US Civil War, Tsar Alexander II, liberator of the peasantry, sent his fleet to America’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts to deter British and French intervention schemes.

In Realpolitik, where expediency is the order of the day, alliances are defined by a common adversary. For both Russia and the United States, that adversary was not simply another nation-state like England or France, but a financial international bent on controlling the world through elaborate fraud, war, and revolution. Banking dynasties under names like Rothschild, and later Morgan, Warburg, and Rockefeller, had ascended to power in the West from the seventeenth century onward.

Their planned global imperium of borderless labor and capital flows, today promoted as the Open Society by billionaire speculators such as George Soros, was already entering its initial stages of implementation. Thus the fledgling American Republic, an Enlightenment project but not yet under bankster domination, and Imperial Russia could unite for the freedom of their peoples and against the assaults of the Money Power.

What changed? In the early twentieth century the masters of usury struck back decisively against the United States and Russia, by stealth in the former case and an outright coup d’état in the latter. Through various machinations, the privately-run Federal Reserve Bank was established in 1913 to issue the US currency at interest, suborning institutions of government and crushing Americans with a national debt now counted in unfathomable trillions.

The Great War was unleashed upon Europe in a nightmarish conflagration, and in 1917 the Russian Revolution, funded by the banking houses of London and Wall Street, installed a vicious Bolshevik regime – dependent on Western credit for the whole of its existence. As for the rest of the twentieth century, we witness globalist plutocrats’ use of dialectics, wielding ideologies as weapons and pitting nation against nation, in the Hegelian procession toward the World State.

Today the realization of that Novus Ordo Seclorum draws ever nearer. And as its grand strategist emeritus Zbigniew Brzezinski makes clear, Washington’s “indispensability” marks only a period of transition:

In the long run, global politics are bound to become increasingly uncongenial to the concentration of hegemonic power in the hands of a single state. Hence, America is not only the first, as well as the only, truly global superpower, but is also likely to be the very last.

Brzezinski artfully neglects mention of what is intended to supersede American unipolarity: planetary tyranny, a system of total population control and resource extraction. Moreover, all of this is being constructed in the name of “liberty” and “equality,” abstractions serving as mere rhetorical cover for a demonic will to power. It is the liberal program of the oligarchs that has erected an all-pervasive surveillance grid unprecedented in scope, and it is their program that aims to rob man of his faith, family, and heritage, abolishing all that makes him truly human. In the novel The Possessed, Fyodor Dostoevsky articulated this drive with prophetic pathos through his utopian theorist Shigalev, who “proceeding from limitless freedom,” would “bring about an unlimited despotism.” Pyotr Verkhovensky, the leader of the story’s revolutionary cell, exults:

To level the mountains is a good notion, not a ridiculous one. I'm for Shigalev! We don't need education, enough of knowledge! There will be enough material for a thousand years, but obedience must be arranged. There's too little of one thing in the world: obedience. The wish for education is already an aristocratic wish. A little bit of family or love, and you have a desire for property. We will kill the desire: we'll unleash drunkenness, scandal, denunciation; we'll unleash unheard-of deviance; any genius we'll extinguish in infancy. All toward one denominator: total equality... The slaves must have rulers. Total obedience, total impersonality, but once every thirty years Shigalev will set off a spasm, and everyone will begin to eat each other to a certain point, just so that everything’s not boring.

Behind every effective revolutionary stands the financier who created him. Equality to the slaves, an equality of the graveyard, and to the moneyed elite – godlike power over the Cosmos. In exchange for ever more "inherent rights" and meaningless depraved spectacle, socially-engineered mass man forfeits his freedom and his soul. With the West conquered, now all of humanity is set for standardization through postmodern colonialism, covert-action NGOs, carrier battle groups, and killer drones. Any sovereign state resisting the march of progress must be destroyed.

At the Cold War’s end, a defunct Soviet Union was supposed to fold into the world controllers’ planned capitalist-communist synthesis, and minor “rogues” like Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Libya could be dismembered with impunity in the meantime. From the chaos, destitution, and demoralization of the post-collapse period, however, another Russia has slowly re-emerged, its people broadly nationalist and increasingly unashamed of their thousand-year ancestral faith, Orthodox Christianity (see footnote).

Nothing could be more intolerable to the robber-baron superclass, who have already for the past century waged ruthless war against religion and organic cultural identity in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere to impose their desolating vision upon mankind.

Another round of US-Russia tensions might be unfolding, but such a clash was neither foreordained nor inevitable; between the two largely distant lands there is mutual nuclear deterrence and an absence of directly conflicting vital interests. Beyond inane sloganeering about democracy and human rights, more sophisticated Western strategists can cite new iterations of Halford Mackinder’s Heartland thesis or the latest Eurasian pipeline maneuvers as reasons to “contain” Russia.

None of this accounts for a cosmopolitan oligarchy that sets policy, subsidizes scholarship, and manufactures consent in pursuit of its totalitarian agenda. In their quest to liquidate the American, the Russian, and every other unique people, the predators from the bankster international consider themselves above all laws human and divine. Yet the swelling arrogance of sociopaths brings about their downfall – and the sooner their crime spree comes to an end, the better chance we all might have for peace and reconciliation.
-------
Footnote: It should be noted that even Russia is still not free of the banksters in its own state apparatus, with the Central Bank and the Medvedev government under the influence of pro-Western liberal technocrats familiar with Putin from his days in St. Petersburg. With economic warfare waged by the international a present-day reality, it would be reasonable to expect a quick resolution to this problem in the near future.

Post: #159

(12-17-2014 01:09 PM)presidentcarter Wrote:  I could visibly see the look of distress on people's faces today. My student's are mostly hopeless, admitting that Russia is fucked, at least in the short term. People are canceling their vacation plans. There was an argument on the metro car with like 5-10 people. I don't know what the topic was...but I've never seen this in all of the hours I've spent on the metro. Two of my classes, when I came to the class and said how is everyone, they responded with something like "not as good as you are". They assume just because you're American, that you're basking in the glory of holding dollars. I reminded them that I earn money here in rubles, so I am in the same boat as them. They are also resenting their expat colleagues who earn money in euros.

Sure, it may be a great time to visit here and really stretch those dollars out. But, I'm curious to see how this dark cloud will effect the general mood here. Living in a place that's already stoic and cold and now adding the currency collapse could be a very depressing environment. Not to mention increased resentment for the "newly rich foreigner".

Really sad to hear this.

If I were Russian I'd be pretty pissed at the West no matter how the Ukraine situation has unfolded. With Obama approving even more sanctions today even more so. That would go for anyone in the West pretty much - Canada, Norway, Australia etc. The average person on the street doesn't care about whether or not the US and EU helped start the war in Ukraine or if Russia actually invaded the East. All they know is that every single former Warsaw Pact country outside Ukraine is now a part of NATO (which doesn't really need to exist in their minds) and that Ukraine is the last barrier and the West is trying to both move in there and wreck the Russian economy at the same time. It's hard now to convince them otherwise I think.

Post: #160

The ruble has started well this morning again, £1 = 91.5, 1 euro = 72.3 and $1 = 58.9

I don't think it'll rebound to what it was before all this started, but let's see what Putin has to say today and what effect that has.

If it stays this way I'll be glad I pulled the trigger and bought a bunch of rubles a couple of days ago, when it was around $1 = 68 rubles.

Post: #161

Putin will move the needle. The markets are probably in a holding pattern to see if he signals Russia will take a substantially new/different course or if it does more of the same.

When I wake up tomorrow morning I'll immediately look at the dollar-ruble rate before reading anything else. That will let me know if Putin said anything profound.

Post: #162

(12-18-2014 03:36 AM)Big Nilla Wrote:  Putin will move the needle. The markets are probably in a holding pattern to see if he signals Russia will take a substantially new/different course or if it does more of the same.

When I wake up tomorrow morning I'll immediately look at the dollar-ruble rate before reading anything else. That will let me know if Putin said anything profound.

Starts in 15 minutes.

Post: #163

I went to a salsa place on Tuesday when dollar hit 77RUB. I talked to some friends and made new ones - but the general consensus was - Russia is fucked! These people's wages went half as they used to be only several months ago. On the top of that, you couldn't even buy dollars at the official rate - banks were selling them around 100RUB/1USD. Most people in Russia spend all their money for food/rent every month. What is going to happened now when their buying power went about in half - I can't even imagine!
Four girls approached me that evening to just chit chat,asking how I was. I have never been approached by four girls in the same evening - one or two at the most ! I recently moved in with my gf - but I noted the attention and I'll keep an eye on the opportunities.
Prices are still the same - for how long - who knows! But I did some shopping as prices became about 30% less than in the US for the same goods.
I regret not buying rubles at all..I was thinking why buy something that loses its value every passing day? Today 1USD is around 60. I hope Putin says something stupid tonight and I become well off overnight again!
Wrong timing to get a girlfriend?

Post: #164

+1 Rep point for Wayout for really good description of how a sharply defined arbitrage situation is playing out in practical terms.

It's like women are really shameless but it's just genetic, they have to corral resources for their potential future children.

Post: #165

Putin announces no new measures but tells Russians to be ready for recession. Says that the Russian Central Bank shouldn't use its reserves to prop up the Ruble: Link

Quote:Russian President Vladimir Putin said the central bank shouldn’t waste reserves on the market to help protect the ruble as he vowed to see the country through the current economic downturn as he did after the 2008 global financial crisis.

“Under the most negative external economic scenario, this situation can last 2 years,” Putin said today at his annual press conference in Moscow. “After this, growth is unavoidable.”

Putin is trying to reassure citizens after the currency plunged this week, bringing back memories of the financial crisis that wiped out Russians’ savings in 1998, the year before he came to power. The ruble has dropped more than 40 percent since June as oil trades near a five-year low and sanctions over the Ukraine conflict hit the economy.

Putin has enjoyed near-record approval ratings since Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula in March. He brushed off the U.S. and European Union punitive measures in response to the action, saying in his annual address to parliament two weeks ago that Russia’s former Cold War enemies would have “come up with some other excuse” to contain the country if the crisis had not occurred.

After an emergency meeting, the central bank announced the largest interest rate increase since Russia’s 1998 default in the early hours of Dec. 16, increasing the key rate by 6.5 percentage points to 17 percent.

That failed to halt the slide in the ruble, which at one point during the day fell to a record of 80 per dollar, from 34 half a year ago. It rebounded 12 percent yesterday after the Finance Ministry pledged to use as much as $7 billion to support the currency.

The central bank also announced steps yesterday to stabilize the banking system, including allowing lenders to use a third-quarter exchange rate -- before the acceleration in the ruble’s decline -- to value risk-weighted assets.

The country’s reserves have declined by about a fifth to $416 billion over the past year as the central bank tried in vain to defend the currency. As Russians feel the effects of accelerating inflation, which rose to 9.1 percent in November, the fastest since June 2011, the economy may shrink almost 5 percent next year if oil prices stay at $60, the monetary authority forecast last week.

“It’s no longer possible to go on in the same fashion, the economy is tumbling,” said Masha Lipman, an independent political analyst in Moscow. “But the problem is political, there has been a powerful tilt away from liberal-minded economists toward the security elites.”

A truce that began on Dec. 9 in eastern Ukraine has started to take hold. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov backed Ukraine’s territorial integrity and rejected the notion of a “second Crimea” in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk as he struck a conciliatory tone in an interview with France 24 television on Dec. 16.

Ruble now trading at 61.86 to the USD.

HSLD

Post: #166

USD/RUB standing at 61RUB=$1 at the moment. Pretty much unchanged after Putin's speech earlier.

Also, looks as though anti-American sentiment among Russians is quite high at the moment:




http://rbth.com/society/2014/12/17/a_war...42327.html

Post: #167

(12-18-2014 06:25 AM)presidentcarter Wrote:  USD/RUB standing at 61RUB=$1 at the moment. Pretty much unchanged after Putin's speech earlier.

What is the buy/sell rate listed at exchange offices on the street? Also, if you ask for dollars at an exchange office, what do they say?

In Ukraine, the exchange offices have numbers listed but you actually ask them for dollars, they claim to be out of dollars. But then if you ask them to change only $50 of your $100 bill, suddenly they have dollars to give you as change.

Post: #168

Maybe Putin will pull a rabbit out of the hat in the future like when Ukraine was on the verge of beating the rebels and he flipped it to help the rebels route Kiev's forces (but didn't allow them to finish the job). But that's probably wishful thinking. His political mind seems to relate to judo... allow the other to make a move then react by taking them off balance. But he hasn't really reacted here.

I get why he is preparing Russians for a bad 1-2 years, but really, they don't need to have a bad 2 years. He has some long term things going in Russia's favor, but he needs to make some short term moves to get over this hump. He's allowing the Russian people to take unnecessary damage. He could also flip things and do major damage immediately to Europe and North America's economies, but doesn't.

Maybe Putin is allowing some bad things to happen to facilitate and justify getting rid of some of the Medvedev people. Who knows.

Post: #169

(12-18-2014 07:41 AM)William Windsor Wrote:  

(12-18-2014 06:25 AM)presidentcarter Wrote:  USD/RUB standing at 61RUB=$1 at the moment. Pretty much unchanged after Putin's speech earlier.

What is the buy/sell rate listed at exchange offices on the street? Also, if you ask for dollars at an exchange office, what do they say?

In Ukraine, the exchange offices have numbers listed but you actually ask them for dollars, they claim to be out of dollars. But then if you ask them to change only $50 of your $100 bill, suddenly they have dollars to give you as change.

It varies by the shop, but the one I saw today (around 11am Moscow time) was 58/80. They will also slap you with a few percentage points of fees. The banks' rates will be a littler better, but I'm sure they've got a huge spread at the moment as well. They clearly don't want anyone getting dollars.

Post: #170

(12-18-2014 07:41 AM)William Windsor Wrote:  What is the buy/sell rate listed at exchange offices on the street? Also, if you ask for dollars at an exchange office, what do they say?

In Ukraine, the exchange offices have numbers listed but you actually ask them for dollars, they claim to be out of dollars. But then if you ask them to change only $50 of your $100 bill, suddenly they have dollars to give you as change.

Never been to FSU, nor am I in the business, but I believe this is because $50s and $100s are more valuable to them than lower denominations bills. Many places I've seen give you a better rate for these notes than for ones or fives, for example. If you're willing to give them a $100 they would gladly give you $50 in local currency and $50 in tens or whatever. They take up less space and are easier to transport.

Post: #171

Russia is affected by the current low oil prices, but this is due to a glut that won't last. The price is so low that at least some production will dry up, and people will increase their use of cheap oil. This phenomena will dampen the fracking boom in the US as well, but from what I've read, the glut is unlikely to last much more than a year. $50-60/barrel is not a sustainable price level, and it will eventually go up. Once the glut is over and prices rise, then new exploration and drilling will resume. In the long run (over several decades), there not be enough oil to supply energy demands, and other, more expensive energy sources will be necessary. In this environment, the remain oil can only be a source of vast wealth. If anything, an oil producing country is smarter to sit on their oil now, and produce it in 20 years when it is more valuable.
Putin is right in saying this current crisis will end and that growth is inevitable in the long run.

Post: #172

Very curious about these current currency volatilities
I read Jim Rickards Currency Wars and reading The Death of Money ATM
Correct me where need as this is what I thought was going on:

Russia is backing the Assad Government providing arms in the Syrian civil conflict
The Syrian conflict exists because the west wants to put an oil pipeline through Syria to Turkey to get Saudi oil into Europe
Saudi oil into Europe counters the Russian oil and Gas monopoly it currently holds over UK and Europe where they can turn off supply or charge what they wanted at a time suiting Russia
Russia and China have recently purchased truckloads of physical gold
US banks have been meddling in the commodity markets by naked short selling gold ETF's to supress a breakout in gold value (measured in $USD) and therefore maintaining confidence in the $USD as a global reserve currency (as per Nixon Shock 1971).

Questions
Can US interests (banks) manipulate the Rouble as they have with gold?
Why doesn't Russia retaliate with restricting energy flow west as a fuck you too response
Why doesn't Russia, China and Iran re establish a gold reserve to an new currency breaking the US reserve currency status?
Do you think that Fort knox is empty as the Fed's gold reserves have already been rehypothecated?

Post: #173

Ruble Advances as Cash Crunch From Higher Rates Supports Demand

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-19...emand.html

Post: #174

(12-19-2014 05:46 PM)Bazzwaldo Wrote:  Questions
Can US interests (banks) manipulate the Rouble as they have with gold?
Why doesn't Russia retaliate with restricting energy flow west as a fuck you too response
Why doesn't Russia, China and Iran re establish a gold reserve to an new currency breaking the US reserve currency status?
Do you think that Fort knox is empty as the Fed's gold reserves have already been rehypothecated?

-Yes, US banks can manipulate the ruble by shorting it.

-Russia is not retaliating by restricting energy supply because it needs the hard currency (euros & dollars) it earns by selling oil and gas.

-Gold backed currency is not popular with either of the central banks in Russia or China for obvious reasons: it would eliminate the need for a central bank.

-The gold is there, it has just been leased out to some extent to major banks, and those banks in turn rehypothicate the leased gold contracts on the market.

Post: #175

The last couple of days the ruble looks to be settling in the high $50s and low $60s, which is good news for Russia at least if it holds, and it's still good for us foreigners if you're just looking at the everyday cost of living rather than expensive consumer goods. I read a few reports though which suggested airline prices were going up even in the domestic sector, as well as train fares, so you probably won't see any advantage if you're looking to take in a few cities or do the Trans-Siberian.