Russia

Give me that!!

It belongs to the Chinese now!

h/t @FedPorn

As we previously detailed,  two topics we’ve deemed critically important to a thorough understanding of both global finance and the shifting geopolitical landscape are the death of the petrodollar and the idea of yuan hegemony. 

In November 2014, in “How The Petrodollar Quietly Died And No One Noticed,” we said the following about the slow motion demise of the system that has served to perpetuate decades of dollar dominance:

Late last month, we took a look at Russia’s economy and concluded that although the country has proven to be remarkably resilient in the face of collapsing crude prices, the outlook is darkening.

Via The New York Review of Books,

The following is a revised version of an interview between George Soros and Gregor Peter Schmitz of the German magazine WirtschaftsWoche.

Gregor Peter Schmitz: When Time put German Chancellor Angela Merkel on its cover, it called her the “Chancellor of the Free World.” Do you think that is justified?

A Grand Book From The Saker

Paul Craig Roberts

Several years ago a new commentator appeared on the scene. He writes under the pen name, The Saker, and describes himself as European born son of Russian refugees from the Bolshevik Revolution. He has two US college degrees and worked in Europe as a military analyst until his opposition to the US/NATO sponsored wars in Chechnia, Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo cost him his career. He retooled as a software engineer and began writing in response to the nonsense spewed by the Western media.

14 months ago, Saudi Arabia had a plan.

That plan involved deliberately suppressing the price of crude in order to bankrupt the US shale complex and put pressure on the Russians who were still clinging to the notion that Bashar al-Assad would remain President of Syria.

Preserving crude market share and securing the “ancillary diplomatic benefits” (to quote The New York Times) of lower oil prices has proven to be a trickier proposition than Riyadh originally imagined.