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Bet on Vlad

Monday March 3, 2014

I made the comment on the investment blog that the smart money would 'bet on Vlad.'  So far that prediction is working pretty well. Here is a good summary on red flags the West ignored.  AFter drawing a red line in Syria and then failing to follow through, Putin seized the initiative so keep his man Assad in Office, and his Navy Base in the med.

In 2011 Ralph Peters correctly identified Putin as the most dangerous man in the world.  As Peters describes it, Putin wants a Russian commodity economy. He can and does control that. He could not control an economy that was consumer oriented. And so six to seven decades after the end of WW II, Russia does not produce a single consumer product other than vodka and AK 47s.

Dictators and tyrants will always expand into weakness. Putin ahs been trying out the U S  Syria and found nothing to stop him. And so he invades the Ukraine.

Fredrick Forsythe laid all this out in The Devil's Alternative originally published in the 1970s. Now it is coming true, the fight for the Ukraine, the bread basket for Russia.  Russia also has the ability to declare the food unsafe that is exported cutting off income for the Ukraine, and of course Russia controls its energy supplies. There is a parallel, Stalin tried to choke off Berlin after WW II. THe US responded with

teh Berlin Airlift.   I don't see anything like that as possible now. Berlin was a small city, the Ukraine if an entire country.

The markets are overbought this is the opportunity to claim this incident is taking them down,

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2 responses to “Bet on Vlad”

  1. yeret Avatar
    yeret

    “But the markets are punishing Russia much more swiftly than the diplomats…A wide range of Russian assets—stocks, bonds, and the ruble—plunged in value today.And so, perhaps for the first time since unrest broke out in Ukraine, Putin may be finding that his actions have costs—not the costs that world leaders threaten to impose in vague communiqués, but the pain that results from thousands of nameless, faceless transactions in stock, bond, and currency markets as investors flee the uncertainty and instability sown by Moscow’s unpredictable intentions in Ukraine. These are attacks that cannot be repelled by troops and tanks, but the damage they cause is every bit as real.”
    http://qz.com/183182/the-markets-are-punishing-russia-more-swiftly-than-diplomats-ever-could/

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  2. dennis.elam Avatar
    dennis.elam

    As a KGB agent, Putin longs for the day when Russia was a first rate power, or so we thought. He has discarded the opportunity to become a consumer power like western nations preferring to control the commodity exports of the country. Yes the ruble and the markets fell in Russia, and so he withdraws to let things settle down, But he will quietly keep the pressure up. I did notice a comment that with the chinese in Siberia one day China might decide to arrive on the scene to keep Chinese citizens n Russia safe, at that point I doubt anyone would arrive to help Vlad.

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