Current Affairs Ukraine
- Thread starter Mutzo Nutzo
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Deleted member 48881
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They just entered Kharkiv ?
Martin Alvito
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1) Abolish reserve requirements so the banks don't fail due to prospective runs.
2) Force official IOUs for withdrawals that are legal tender, and are exchangeable for currency as it is printed in the order in which they are issued, or better yet in an order determined by random, televised draw. In other words, citizens are effectively forced to transact business through the banks in the near term until the printing presses catch up. It would be cumbersome (think going back to checkbooks), but it would work.
3) Sell 1:1 IOUs for the frozen reserves if liquidity becomes a problem. They will trade at a hefty discount, and are a problem later. So what? People will chase those returns, most of them end up in Western hedge fund coffers, and negotiating a haircut that permits a tidy profit to speculators but isn't crippling to Russia goes on the table when settling all of this. It beats financial collapse.
You could never pull such nonsense in a democratic country with a legislature accountable to voters, but you can do it in an authoritarian one.
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Martin Alvito
Player Valuation: £50m
I don't agree with the experts' predictions here for the above reasons. They all have the same problem that I used to face when trying to explain authoritarian politics to undergraduates. They are socialized from birth to believe things like nameplates on doors both indicating the job description and powers of an office, due to deep institutionalization in the West.
In the context of making predictions, this means that they miss moves available to leaders elsewhere that would not be available to the leaders of the countries whose economies they spend most of their time studying.
PeregrineT
Player Valuation: £40m
Its a good place for them to die.
Zatara
Player Valuation: £100m
In short:
1: I go to the bank to make a SWIFT transfer and Its rejected.
2: I then ask for all my deposits to be moved into USD...that request is rejected.
3: I am told the banks dont need to actually hold MY money safely and they will give me an IOU.
4: This IOU is either for:
A: Frozen monies which could take a long time to unfreeze when i need money today.
B: Monies being printed while the Ruble is at a very low value.
Can you see the problem here?
Again, you are talking about the Western world...but you mean the USA.
Ive given you one example in South East Asia which affected multiple countries and currencies. There are also examples in Europe, South America and Africa.
Russia isnt North Korea. But thats what youre implying.
Yarrgh
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Tied his hands behind his back and then shot himself in the head?
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Deleted member 48881
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hope so brother
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Deleted member 48881
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This vid made me hopeful
It appears as if the Russian forces, including VDV units, started a major assault on the outskirts of Kyiv just after dawn.
Martin Alvito
Player Valuation: £50m
I don't think you're understanding what I'm saying. Item #1 is self-evident. Item #2 addresses LL's 100% accurate point re: physical limitations on the amount of available physical currency available to ordinary Russian citizens with deposits denominated in rubles. They want rubles, but you know you're going to run out of physical rubles. So you refuse to provide physical rubles, hand citizens something else instead that effectively keeps the money in the banking system for the time being, and declare it legal tender.
Item #3 is regarding frozen central bank reserves, which are not the same as ordinary bank deposits. This subject gets messy and while I understand it, you want someone more qualified than me in that arena explaining that one to you. Long story short, this is how you solve the USD/other currencies problem if you're Russia and all your foreign depositors pull their money out to a degree that cannot be covered. You raise capital among speculative investors, and worry about the consequences later.
It's not much different from Goldman going hat in hand to Buffett and paying him an 8% guaranteed rate of return in order to bail them out in 2008. It will be messier, because Goldman was arguably a stronger institution despite their dire financial straits at the time, but liquidity is a service and someone will provide it at the right risk premium.
Domestic USD withdrawals are solved in other ways, in part. Kompromat can be a useful thing, the oligarchs know that they can't all have all of their money because then they all go down together, and they've all been diversifying into foreign real estate anyway for a rainy day such as this one. They sell some dollar-denominated assets for cashflow when they want to do dollar-denominated things, which they don't much like, and life goes on.
Said undergraduates were not all from the US, thank you very much. Substantial majority, yes. The undergraduates came from all over the world, including Europe, China and various other Asian countries, and I had students from those places. I can tell you that these blind spots were a systemic problem not limited to US-born students.
100% that I never had a student from Africa or South America, though some were enrolled. They didn't go in for squishy BAs in the social sciences. Now if you want to talk about where I got my BA, that was almost all Americans.
In any event, the Asian tigers aren't germane to the discussion because that was a different type of financial crisis. No frozen assets means no IOU sale.
Russia is not North Korea, but Putin has a freer hand than Western analysts seem to think. You can't do this stuff in a Western democracy because overriding existing laws to do this stuff requires an act of volition by legislators that you're not going to get. This is why Geithner et al solved the 2008 problems in the manner in which they did. Members of Congress were not going to approve measures whose consequences they did not understand at that time, so anything requiring an Act of Congress was not a valid move.
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Deleted member 48881
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does it look bad
Martin Alvito
Player Valuation: £50m
Makes sense. Spend the conscripts to take the dirt you're always going to get with combined arms, then bring in the experts to do the difficult fighting on the ground.
Cynical, but a sensible approach.
Yes and no. Any offensive isn't going to be great, but the fact that they're attacking during the day (again) suggests a serial lack of NV or thermal scopes.
@Mutzo Nutzo have you seen any pictures of Russian ground troops with optics? I haven't! Attacking during the day will put the Russians at a disadvantage.
If the Russians continue with their tactics of driving forward with armour and not screening, especially in a city, it could be very bloody for the Russians.
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