The BBC did a report recently about how Russia is evading the sanctions intended to punish its invasion of Ukraine. Apparently, UK law allows that country to import refined petroleum products without regard to where the crude came from. This creates a neat loophole. India (whose foreign policy is at best ambivalent on the subject of the war in Ukraine) imports the crude, refines it, and sells it to the UK. The BBC credits the Centre for Reseach o Energy and Clean Air (CREA) for the key research here. CREA's Europe-Russia policy analyst, Isaac Levi, is quoted saying, "The issue with this loophole is that it increases the demand for Russian crude and enables higher sales in terms of volume and pushing up their price as well, which increases the funds sent to the Kremlin's war chest." Russian oil getting into UK via refinery loophole, reports claim (bbc.com)
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In last year's round-up of the top financial stories, I mentioned that I was somewhat embarrassed that THAT list turned out to be as America-centered as it was. Seven of the stories (every one that was NOT about Ukraine) had a US locus. This year, I don't have that problem. This is a VERY international list. Ukraine is still here, but only once, and the OTHER war that has dominated headlines this year, the Israel/Hamas war, makes its debut in these lists via its ramifications for shipping. Actually, both wars are here with reference to shipping. Likewise, the US is still a locus, but only of three of the twelve big stories: April, June, and November. Less than half of last year's. Two of our US based stories this year concern artificial intelligence as a new industry: the other, one of America's periodic games of chicken with a debt ceiling. China gets and warrants more attention here than any other single country. It is the locus in four of our stories. Af...
The question "why is there a war in Ukraine at this moment?" can be answered simply, but the answer must be compound. "There is a war because Russia invaded Ukraine and much of the western world is assisting Ukraine in its resistance to that invasion." If the second half of that compound wasn't true the war triggered by the first half would likely have been a short one. There would be a larger country called 'Russia' by now, and perhaps that larger country's leaders would allow the captured province to call itself 'Ukraine.' Since both parts of the compound are true, we not only have a war we have a very particular war ... THIS war. So if you want to push the question further, you ought really to push both parts further: why did Russia invade? and why did the western world react the way it has, with rare near-unanimity? And those are both very good questions. To either of them a range of answers may be offered. I expect to come back...
One of the purposes of the severe economic sanctions is to make it impossible for Russia to make the interest payments on their outstanding bonds. Once they default, presumably, their ability to borrow dries up quite quickly, and they'd have no source of funding to continue a long war. I am in sympathy with that design, and would love to see such a default. Unfortunately, I cannot report it yet. Russian sovereign bond payment received by JPMorgan and processed -source | Reuters
Joe Biden's Democratic rivals are going to have to try to cut him down to size. Biden was becoming the Cascades Bigfoot of their fight for their party's nomination even before he announced he was running. Now that he has announced that he IS running, Bigfoot is likely to turn into a Himalayan Yeti. (Yes, I'm assuming that's larger.) They may well use the tale of Hunter Biden's Ukraine adventure to this end. I'm looking at news reports and trying to get a handle on this. Hunter Biden, the former VP's younger son, is not to be confused with his brother Beau, the fellow who succumbed to cancer in 2015. Hunter was a director of eCommerce policy issues in the Department of Commerce under President Clinton. He much later (in 2014) became a member of the board of something called Burisma Holdings, the largest non-government natural gas producer in the Ukraine. That's where our story starts to pick up. Only FOUR DAYS after Burisma announced that Hun...
The Justice Department's bill of indictment against various Russians who are alleged to have worked to influence the 2016 election includes some of the posts they supposedly made on social media outlets. Today, I'd like to talk a bit about one of them, an Instagram post. It reads in relevant part, "[A] particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary." The use of "Killary" was the result of accurate research. Trump's hardcore supporters used it often to suggest that Hillary Clinton was a killer -- a charge going back at least to the discovery of Vince Foster's body in July of 1993. The phrase "particular hype and hatred" seems odd, though. The intended meaning presumably is "certain lies by hateful people directed at Trump are misleading the people" etc. But it takes some time to figure that out. After all, in English "hype" does not necessarily refer to l...
If you wanted to write the recent history of global oil markets, and you wanted to take a Carlylean (or Jamesian) view thereof, who are the outstanding individuals on whose work you might focus? Working from a recent WSJ feature, here are six: Nikolay Buynov: Russian entrepreneur Mohammad al-Sabban: Saudi economist/consultant Gary C. Evans: US/Texas based CEO Yin Shenping: China, entrepreneur on the oil/IT interface Scott Saxberg: Canadian CEO involved in oil sands Adnan al-Janabi: Business & political figure in post-war Iraq. Because I'm feeling lazy, I'll leave you with the list, and a photo of Janabi, above. He's the one on the right.
I generally ask myself at this time of year what were the biggest stories of the past twelve months in business/financial news. Of course, I choose the ones I do largely because they illustrate an important theme, and in the list below I'll spell out and italicize the theme. Yet the theme itself isn't the story. In terms of regional mix, with this line-up I've got two Asian stories (Feb., April), four European stories (January, June, October, December) and six North America (March, May, July, August, September, Nov.). A nice thematic point: I both begin and end with Russia. All that said, here is this year's list. January 2014: Russian oligarchs. The Supreme Court of Russia releases Platon Lebedev, formerly of NFO Menatep, and a man who had spent more than a decade in lock-up. Russia has two oligarch problems: the oligarchs have a stranglehold on key parts of the economy, and the govt., when it does try to break that stranglehold, is ham-fisted an...
Keeping track of the news has become an increasingly dispiriting activity. The events of Thursday, July 17th are themselves sufficient to illustrate this. Malaysian Airlines 17, a commercial flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, crashed in the Ukraine that day. Also, Israel began its ground offensive in Gaza. Meanwhile, the twittersphere was full of speculations about a giant hole in Siberia, something that looks much more ominous than the garden variety sinkhole encountered in places with variable water tables. The hole on the Yamal Peninsula looks positively apocalyptic, and has inspired tralk of everything from global warming, to alien attacks. U.S. business news made its contribution to the distressing tone of the day, as Microsoft announced tens of thousands of layoffs. Microsoft! Fourteen percent of its workforce. How can we wrap our heads around such news? The first was almost certainly a deliberate act of war, the second was quite certainly an esca...
Wojciech Jaruzelski, a man whose passing I cannot regret, RIP. Jaruzelski passed away on May 25th of this year, after suffering a stroke earlier in the month. His place in the history books is ignoble but secure. He was a General by trade, and he became the only military official ever to head a ruling European Communist Party when he became First Secretary in Poland, in October 1981. Two months later he became the General who declared martial law in Poland, acting at the cat's paw of the old Soviet Union. such actions are a sign of a regime's weakness not strength -- the Solidarnosc movement was becoming too much for him. Nowadays, the world still witnesses Russia's efforts to extend its control over its neighbors, largely through complacent local paws. But since the demise of the USSR and the discrediting of the once-marketable ideology of "actually existing communism" has left Moscow's imperial stretch weakened. The flash points now are to the...
In our Mother Country, Nigel Farage has been debating Nick Clegg of late. The most recent, the one that has me paying attention now, was the one on Wednesday, April 2, 2014. For my fellow Americans, who only rarely tune into matters on the other sides of oceans -- it is worth your while paying attention to this. Talking myself through it now ... Farange (that's his picture above) is the leader of the UKIP, or the Independence Party, which wants to quit the EU altogether and reduce immigration. Clegg is head of the Liberal Democratic party, which is in coalition with the (larger) Conservative Party in the present government. Clegg also has the title Deputy Prime Minister. The aforesaid CP hasn't been taking part in these exchanges. Neither has the other Major Party, Labour. Its a little bit as if, in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt had debated Eugene Debs, leaving both the incumbent president (Taft) and the major party challenger (Wilson) out of the e...
Going into the winter Olympics this year, there was a lot of talk about a terrorist strike, the possibility that somebody (and, given the neighborhood of Sochi, most likely some Islamicist terrorist group) would use the world-wide spotlight such games provide to showcase their own violence and their Grand Cause. Memories of Munich in 1972 and all that. I'm happy to say that it didn't happen. As Sherlock Holmes would say: the mad dogs didn't howl. That was the curious incident in the night-time. The second thing? The games offered, as they always do, remarkable examples of athleticism at its best. On February 9th, the host Russian team won the gold medal in "team trophy" figure skating, with outstanding performances by Evgeni Plushenko and Julia Lipnitskaya. On February 11, Dara Howell, of Canada, one of the three women portrayed above, won gold in the Ladies Ski Slopestyle. She came from nowhere, was favored by nobody, yet richly deserved the medal. Here is ...
For my week-by-week desk calendar through 2014, I will rely on an unflashy but serviceable volume from American Express. As with last year's Amex calendar, there are factual tidbits on each page about various destinations where I can presumably enjoy a debt-financed vacation with my Amex card. The earliest pages tell me various facts for example with reference to Mykonos, in Greece, the red dot in the map you see here. I learn in this way that Mykonos is home to the a neighborhood known as Little Venice, "whose waterfront houses with their colorful balconies recall the quarter's Italian namesake." While Mykonos gets January, the site of this year's winter Olympics, Sochi in Russia, gets February. Events will be clustered in two distinct parts of Sochi, "a coastal cluster for indoor ice events and a mountain cluster for skiing ... in Krasnaya Polyana." Separately, my month-by-month wall calendar for the new year is entitled "Railroads: Illustratio...
On December 4, 2013, the Russian gas company Gazprom agreed to a delay proposed by the Ukrainian gas company, Nagtogaz, in the repayment of certain debt. This was a small development within a sensitive context. The relationship between these two companies, and by extension between their respective governments, is critical to the energy security of central and western Europe. Indeed, in 2009 Gazprom was less flexible. That year, also a time when winter was coming on and it was faced with an outstanding debt, it cut supplies to the Ukraine for three weeks. This was an is not a bilateral matter. Most of that gas continues its way westward through the Ukraine. The European Union gets one-fifth of its nat gas supplies through that route. But this year there is a complicating factor. The tug-of-war for Ukraine's affiliation between the Eurozone to one side and Russia to the other has become more intense: has, in fact, taken to the streets.
On Thursday I wrote here a brief notice of the passing of Jacques Barzun. Since then a fellow admirer of JB has asked me about two points: if I would care to comment on the tie between Jacques Barzun's thought and that of William James; and if I would share some selections from my correspondence with the former. Given the title of this blog, I can hardly reject the first of those invitations ... though I will put it off, perhaps for another week. Today, I will satisfy the second request. Here are four excerpts from Barzun's letters to me, each dated and preceded by some very brief comments by me (in ital) for context only. I won't even try to defend the views of mine that Barzun is criticizing here. This is about him, not me. October 17, 1986. I had presumptuously made the case for libertarian political philosophy to him, while in the process dissecting what I saw as the faults of other libertarians, especially Robert Nozick. Jacques replied with good humor an...