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...
I wrote for a little more than a year, (ending in April 2022) on a steady basis, for a small operation that hoped to explain public affairs to young people -- pre-teens and early teens. This operation created a small income stream for me ($400 a month) which nonetheless sometimes came in very useful when it arrived. I lost this stream of income when the project closed down operations. Their site went down in the aftermath of the cessation of operations, but someone brought it back. With one cryptic exception there is nothing on it posted subsequent to early May of this year, when they ran out of the inventory of my work. Sooner or later -- likely sooner -- the site will be taken down. I have a fondness for some of the work I did for it, so I will risk whatever the IP consequences might be and post some of my work here. They fall into three categories. I wrote about health (Covid, cancer research, the health insurance industry, etc.), politics (in a narrow sense involving cam...
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...
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. Further, I cannot help the fact that in the list as below currency issues keep coming up. That is a fact about the year, not I think about my biases. All that said, here is this year's list. January 2013: The tablet/smartphone wars. Announcement of the BlackBerry 10 from Canadian concern RiM. Concurrently, RiM changes its name to BlackBerry. This will be their big final bid to remain a player on the level of Apple and the Android group. It will fail. February 2013: Currency as policy. A G-20 finance ministers' meeting in Moscow, Russia, focuses attention on competitive devaluations. Japan escapes explicit censure at...
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.