The Financial Fifth Column

Vladimir Putin’s economics advisor considers the probable effects of the massive globalist sanctions on Russia and concludes most of them can be negated with proper banking policies:

The damage caused by US financial sanctions is inextricably linked to the monetary policy of the Bank of Russia which is the ideal one for them. Its essence boils down to a tight binding of the ruble issue to export earnings, and the ruble exchange rate to the dollar. In fact, an artificial shortage of money is being created in the economy, and the strict policy of the Central Bank leads to an increase in the cost of lending, which kills business activity and hinders the development of infrastructure in the country.

Sanctions restrictions have caused an extremely high demand for corporate financing in the domestic market. Against the background of a relatively low key rate and access to cheaper funding, large banks consistently keep a net interest margin above the average market level, 5.4% to 6%; whereas for the largest banks in China, the USA, Germany, France, Great Britain and Japan, the net interest margin ranges from 0.8% to 2.3%.

However, these windfalls are not directed to financing infrastructure projects, but to the acquisition of disparate non-core businesses that are combined into ecosystems. Most of these businesses remain unprofitable even at the EBITDA [earnings] level. Despite this, billions of rubles are still spent on their development. These figures are quite comparable to the volume of investments in a major infrastructure project in the real sector of the economy, which can bring both job growth and contribution to the development of the economy. But such projects (as well as filling the budget) are still left to the raw materials companies, while the largest financial corporations prefer to direct their income to the creation of chimeras.

In fact, it was the connivance of the Central Bank which led to the fact that Russia and its industry were drained of blood and unable to develop.

If the Central Bank fulfilled its constitutional duty to ensure the stability of the ruble — and it has all the possibilities for this due to the threefold surplus of the currency reserves of the monetary base — then financial sanctions would be nothing to us. They could even be turned, as in other sectors of the economy, to the benefit of the banking sector, if the Central Bank replaced the loans withdrawn by Western partners with its own special refinancing instruments. This would increase the capacity of the Russian credit and banking system by more than 10 trillion rubles. Also, it would fully compensate for the outflow of foreign financing of investments, preventing a decline in investment and economic activity without any inflationary consequences. Thus, it would be possible to avoid a long period of decline in real incomes of the population caused solely by the peculiarities of the monetary policy pursued in Russia, which ensured the effectiveness of sanctions in the monetary and financial sphere.

Assessing the consequences of anti-Russian sanctions, it is impossible to ignore the consequences of severing economic ties with Ukraine. The mutual abolition of the free trade regime and the imposition of an embargo on a wide range of goods led to the rupture of cooperative ties that ensured the reproduction of many types of high-tech products. Blocking the work of Russian banks led to the depreciation of multibillion-dollar Russian investments. The refusal of the Ukrainian authorities to service the debt to Russia caused several billion dollars’ more losses. In total, their volume is estimated at about $100 billion for each of the parties. This is really significant and in many ways irreparable real damage, which we ourselves have aggravated with retaliatory sanctions.

To date, the outcome of the economic consequences of anti-Russian sanctions is as follows. Ukraine suffered the biggest losses relative to GDP, in absolute terms — the European Union. Russian losses of potential GDP, since 2014, amount to about 50 trillion rubles. But only 10% of them can be explained by sanctions, while 80% of them were the result of monetary policy. The United States benefits from anti-Russian sanctions, replacing the export of Russian hydrocarbons to the EU, as well as China; replacing the import of European goods by Russia. We could completely offset the negative consequences of financial sanctions if the Bank of Russia fulfilled its constitutional duty to ensure a stable ruble exchange rate, and not the recommendations of Washington financial organizations.

Consider the threats of American and European Russophobes against the new ‘sanctions from hell’. It has already been mentioned above that the threat of disconnecting Russian banks from the SWIFT system, widely discussed in the media today, although it will interfere with international settlements at first, will benefit the Russian banking and payment system in the medium term.

The threat to ban transactions with Russian bonds will also benefit us, since their issue in a budget surplus is nothing more than a source of profit for foreign speculators. And their profitability is overestimated three times in relation to the market assessment of their riskiness. The termination of the self-serving [самоедской] policy of the monetary authorities, who are borrowing money which is objectively unnecessary to the budget at exorbitant prices, will allow us to save billions of dollars. If the sanctioneers try to prohibit the purchase of the foreign currency bonds of Russian corporations, then it will be possible to compensate for the missing financing for the purchase of imported equipment by buying them out at the expense of part of the excess foreign exchange reserves. If foreign loans are cut off to them, then the risk of their default will fall on the European and American banks themselves.

There is also a potential risk of seizure of Russian state assets. But we can respond to this symmetrically by imposing an embargo on servicing debt obligations to Western creditors and also arresting their assets. The losses of the parties will be approximately equal.

There remains, in fact, one threat – to take away foreign assets from Russian oligarchs. For all its popularity among the common people, this will stimulate the return of capital exported from the country, which will also have a positive effect for the Russian economy.

The evils of free trade are such that the penalties imposed by its defenders are actually a long-term blessing. However, incompetent or treasonous monetary policy can harm any country, regardless of what its external trade possibilities are. In any case, sovereignty is always more important than sanctions or access to global markets, especially for a country rich in human potential and natural resources.

DISCUSS ON SG

Lessons for the Next War

Karl Denninger observes that while the Purebloods survived, they lost the war:

Purebloods learned a lot about human nature. The more cynical among us decided people are selfish enough to sell out the most vulnerable for the illusion of safety. We learned who had balls and who our real friends were. Sometimes we surprised ourselves with what we were willing to do. Or accept to get along. Sometimes enlightenment is empowering, and sometimes it’s humbling.

We learned people were either convinced by logical arguments or they weren’t. No amount of logic penetrated a feelings shield, yet many of us wasted breath trying to reach our loved ones. There was no perfect argument that made them understand.

We learned some people love clown world. They forget contradictory statements made a month apart. Maybe a goldfish memory allows them to function, but others cannot stand living in a land of liars and gas lighters.

The only successful peaceful protests involve withdrawing consent. Truckers blocking Ottawa received international attention, but only resulted in tiny changes. The People’s Convoy in America had absolutely no effect, but I heard it was a pretty good parade.

Vacationing in place either deliberately or due to fatigue is a more effective tactic because it costs the company money. I can’t wait to see the second quarter Productivity and Costs report from the Bureau of Lies and Scams. If your company bent you over take advantage of the lube shortage when returning the favor.

We are on our own. No one is coming to save us. As of yet, no widespread lawsuits have been filed against vaccine mandating companies. The whole “keep on waiting for it” really sounds familiar doesn’t it? We’ve all heard this one before: Just wait, two weeks to flatten the curve. Just wait, in two weeks there will be an explosion in coof cases. Just wait, in two weeks some lawyer will file a lawsuit. Maybe one will, maybe one won’t. Put not your hopes in men.

Don’t count on political leadership either. Remember what a huge disappointment Trump turned out to be? Years of Qanon bull**** and all we got was terrorism charges for the January 6th protesters. DeSantis is a scummy politician whose every statement is calculated towards his victory condition: President of the United States. The OSHA and CMS mandate hearings came too late for some. Even though the OSHA ruling was struck down, companies kept their vaccine mandates. So far this insult has not been redressed by the courts.

Where does this leave us for the next war? We don’t know how, we don’t know when, but life is a series of battles. Each of us fights our own.

Something I say time and time again is plan how you will react before you face a situation. First, you must identify the conflict and your line in the sand. How will you react when it is crossed? Will you bargain? Will you punch the problem in the face? Will you run? Each fight is different, making a decision now is less stressful than in the moment.

In order to win the next war, it is important to acknowledge why we lost this one.

The purebloods lost because we compromised with evil. As soon we did (and continued to do so), our defeat was certain. It simply took a while to arrive.

Many of us did not recognize our actions as compromises initially. That will not be an excuse the next time somebody pulls this bull****. It started early in the war. Closing businesses and schools were the first ones. Most of us believed that it would only last for two weeks before life returned to normal.

One lesson is if there is widespread compromise in the next skirmish and there is no leader, your job as a soldier is to inflict maximum damage on the way to defeat. With this mindset you are accepting that you have lost, so your goal is to run up the scoreboard. There are numerous nonviolent ways to achieve a high score. Make a list of tactics now so when the time comes you shall act on them.

The most important lesson is to recognize evil and refuse to compromise with it.

Those who refuse to recognize evil, or who cannot do so, will be defeated by it, no matter how smart or how Christian or how good they happen to be. As Sun Tzu observes, the way to ensure defeat is to neither know yourself nor your enemy.

And as we have all observed, much to our disappointment and discomfiture, the number of people who are willing and able to recognize evil and refuse to compromise with it are vanishingly small.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Dark Empath

Well, there goes my psychological self-defense. Curse you, pseudoscience! Although this recent taxonomical definition does underline my point that I am not a sociopath.

Recent research has found that individuals who boast dark personality traits, such as narcissism, can still retain high levels of cognitive and affective empathy. The study, recently published in Personality and Individual Differences, identifies these types of people as “dark empaths.”

Empathy can be broken up into three categories: cognitive, which describes the intellectual understanding of someone else’s feelings without sensing them; affective, or feeling someone else’s emotions as your own; or compassionate, a combination of cognitive and emotional empathy.

Individuals are considered dark empaths when they possess cognitive and/or affective empathy as well as characteristics from the “dark triad” — a collective term for three dark personality traits: Machiavellianism, psychopathy and narcissism.

Traditionally, researchers have found that those with darker characteristics are often associated with a lack of empathy.

And while this new data, which the researchers gathered from a group of 1,000 individuals, certainly reinforces that assertion, it also indicates a strong presence for the dark empath group.

“As expected, we found a traditional dark triad group with low scores in empathy (about 13 percent of the sample). We also found a group with lower to average levels across all traits (about 34 percent were ‘typicals’) and a group with low dark traits and high levels of empathy (about 33 percent were empaths),” the study’s authors said.

“However, a fourth group of people, the ‘dark empaths,’ was clearly evident. They had higher scores on both dark traits and empathy (about 20 percent of our sample). Interestingly, this latter group scored higher on both cognitive and affective empathy than the ‘dark triad’ and ‘typical’ groups,” they added.

The team said they were not entirely surprised that the dark empaths scored as high as they did in the cognitive and affective empathy sections.

“This makes sense in a way, as to manipulate others for your own gain — or indeed enjoy the pain of others — you must have at least some capacity to understand them,” they explained.

The researchers also found that the dark empaths were more indirectly aggressive than typicals and empaths.

As it has been said, one is advised to most fear the torturer who sheds tears for the pain of his victims.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Renaissance Man

It turns out that the Russians were telling the truth, there is a direct tie between the Biden crime family and the US bioweapon laboratories in the Ukraine, and the FBI was in possession of the evidence proving that for more than 15 months prior to the Russian special military operation there:

Russia’s assertion that President Biden’s son Hunter was “financing . . . biological laboratories in Ukraine” was based in truth, according to e-mails reviewed by The Post.

A trove of e-mails on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop — the existence of which was exclusively reported by The Post in October 2020 — found that he played a role in helping a California defense contractor analyze killer diseases and bioweapons in Ukraine.

Moscow has claimed that secret American biological-warfare labs in Ukraine were a justification for its unprovoked invasion of the neighboring country last month. It doubled down on the accusations Thursday, claiming the labs produced biochemical weapons at the Biden family’s behest.

“US President Joe Biden himself is involved in the creation of biolaboratories in Ukraine,” Russia’s State Duma speaker, Vyacheslav Volodin said, according to state media.

“An investment fund run by his sun [sic] Hunter Biden funded research and the implementation of the United States’ military biological program. It is obvious that Joe Biden, as his father and the head of state, was aware of that activity,” Volodin continued, demanding a US Congressional investigation and a White House explanation.

US intelligence officials had earlier dismissed Russia’s messaging as war propaganda, explaining that Ukraine’s network of biological labs dedicated to pathogen research were not secret, and had publicly received funding from Washington.

However, Russia’s new claim that the first son’s investment fund was involved in raising money for biolab projects in Ukraine was accurate, according to e-mails involving Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine, first obtained by The Post and initially reported on by The Daily Mail Friday.

Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners invested $500,000 in the San Francisco pathogen research company Metabiota and raised millions more through firms that included Goldman Sachs, according to the e-mails found on the computer, which was abandoned at a Delaware repair shop in April 2019 as Joe Biden ran for president.

Hunter introduced Metabiota to officials at Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company where he was a board member, for a “science project” involving biolabs in Ukraine, the e-mails show.

A memo from a Metabiota official to the then-vice president’s son in 2014 said the company could “assert Ukraine’s cultural and economic independence from Russia.”

Hunter’s a busy guy right out of a Bond film written by scriptwriters on an LSD trip. Who would have imagined that when Hunter’s not painting million-dollar paintings, banging prostitutes, banging his relatives, banging his underage relatives, smoking meth, or sitting on the board of major international petrochemical corporations, he’s constructing secret weapons labs in Ukraine.

Some might conclude from all this that he’s just a figurehead intended to be a fall guy for the dark financial forces of the pedocracy, but I think he’s just an example of peak Sigma grindset, the perfect ideal of the modern, multi-talented, 21st-century Renaissance man.

DISCUSS ON SG

Regime Change in Russia

Joe Biden unilaterally declares war on the nation with the most nuclear weapons on the planet.

Now we deign to ourselves the right to remove a nuclear power’s leader and denude its government?

What has Putin argued was the goal of The United States and NATO all along, starting with the lies put forward during the integration process of Germany, we have now confirmed as official US policy?

To destroy Russia — erase it as a nation and replace its government with one fashioned after our ideals.

We have called this claim of Putin’s propaganda, and claimed that was not our goal, nor that of the Western Nations, including but not limited to NATO and the remainder of Europe.

President Biden just admitted that Putin not only as not publishing propaganda now he was never wrong; the Russian premise, that our actions from 2004 forward when we admitted former Soviet satellites to NATO, was indeed to destroy Russia’s government and Russian national identity.

“In this battle we need to be clear-eyed. This battle will not be won in days, or months, either,” Biden said.

So this is not really about Ukraine at all, is it?

No.

Ukraine is simply a foil, a convenient hotbed of corruption that was “useful” to the underlying goal.

The official goal of the Biden Administration is the destruction of Russia.

For the last two decades, across Adminsitrations, it has been about destroying Russia.

And as long as Biden and those who enable him to continue to be President do so it will continue to be about exactly that, which means the real “western goal” is exactly what Putin said it was, and which we stridently (and falsely) maintained it was not.

We got away with this — a policy of “regime change” — in multiple other places. Bosnia and Iraq to name two of several.

Putin isn’t the problem with this statement.

The entire Russian Federal Assembly, along with the Russian people are the problem. Joe Biden just declared war on their political system, their representation such as it is, and their way of life, stating that the United States is now committed to their destruction however long it may take, recognizing and committing to the fact that it will not occur in days, weeks or months.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. It’s worth noting that Russia clearly pays very close attention to these sort of anti-Russian statements by national leaders and takes them at face value.

DISCUSS ON SG

RIP Taylor Hawkins

Of course, we don’t KNOW it’s the vaxx… but it’s the vaxx.

The Foo Fighters longtime, charismatic drummer, Taylor Hawkins, has died at the age of 50.

Hawkins was found dead in a hotel room in the north of Bogota, Colombia where the band were due to play at a festival on Friday night. No cause of death was immediately announced.

Shortly after Hawkins’ death was announced, dozens of fans together with journalists and videographers began to gather outside the hotel where the band had been staying. Many appeared to be in complete shock at the news with some lighting candles.

Ambulances and police cars could be seen stationed outside of the property. Later on Friday night, Hawkins’ body was finally brought out of the hotel, placed into a coroner’s van and driven away.

The group had been scheduled to play at the Festival Estéreo Picnic in the Colombian capital where an announcement told concert-goers that the band would not be playing due to a ‘serious medical condition’.

I suspect there are going to be a lot of deaths attributed to overdoses and other factors that are actually the result of a heart weakened by the Covid vaccinations. Given the unreliability of the medical community, the only reliable statistic will be the sheer number of all-cause deaths, as that’s the one thing that can’t be easily hidden or redefined.

DISCUSS ON SG

Suspending the Arkhaven Blog

No, it’s not being deplatformed or anything like that. The problem is a technical one, as too much traffic over too much time at the arkhavencomics-dot-com site has overwhelmed the WordPress database and the site has bogged down to the point that it is interfering with the necessary operations of the Library store it hosts. So, until the new Castalia Library site goes live, we’re suspending the Arkhaven blog and its comments. We anticipate the new site will be operational in 6-8 weeks.

This will not have any effect on Arktoons, as it utilizes a custom system that is hosted on a different server.

With regards to Castalia Library, Book 13 is The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling and Book 14 is Politics by Aristotle. Also, some good news on the bindery construction, as the machine list is complete, the specificied machines have been acquired, and the entire setup is being operationally tested over the next 2-4 weeks prior to being transported and installed. Best of all, it’s been done within the original budget.

DISCUSS ON SG