he's already at that level :lol:

European Union (EU) plans to give Ukraine a further 1.8 billion euros to help prop up an economy hit hard by a protracted conflict with Russian-backed rebels, European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker said on Thursday (Jan 8).

The 1.8 billion euros (US$2.1 billion, S$2.8 billion) in medium-term loans will help Ukraine meet the "critical challenges" it faces and support the political and economic reforms the European Union believes are crucial to its future, said the Commission

"Ukraine is not alone. Europe stands united behind Ukraine and the reform agenda of the new government," Juncker said in the Commission statement. "The European Union has provided unprecedented financial support and today's proposal proves that we are ready to continue providing that support. This is European solidarity in action."

EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini later added: "We have also said and will continue to say that the financial assistance is linked to their willingness to make reforms."

"It is clear that we need to see this commitment to reforms and some results," she said at another press conference in Riga, citing corruption as an example

I didn't read much in this thread, but can somebody tl;dr if I should sell all my roubles or not?

The European Union will extend by six months sanctions imposed on Russia last March over its annexation of Crimea, add new people to those under sanctions and prepare new measures, draft conclusions for an EU foreign ministers meeting showed.

because if Russia is rated junk, then its companies will be too—which will increase the borrowing costs on their existing debt. It could also trigger earlier bond repayments, which, together with the higher interest rates, could, according to one official, cost them as much as $20 to $30 billion.

And that's $20 to $30 billion it really can't afford. Russia, as I've said before, doesn't have an economy so much as an oil-exporting business that subsidizes everything else. But it can't subsidize much when prices are only $50-a-barrel. That leaves Russia in a world of bad, worse, and Dostoevskian choices.

Cheaper oil, you see, means that Russian companies have fewer dollars to turn into rubles, which is just another way of saying that there's less demand for rubles—so its price is falling. But it can't fall too much or Russian companies, who have a lot of dollar debts they can't roll over due to Western sanctions, won't be able to pay back what they owe. Even worse, Russia banks could face a run on their foreign currency holdings, as people try to turn rubles they think will lose value into dollars that won't.

Russia can't wake up from this economic nightmare, though, because they're not asleep. This is their reality. After falling in almost perfect tandem with oil for most of the year, the ruble started free falling in December. In under a week, it went from 55 to 75 rubles per dollar—a 36 percent decline—and the panic got so bad that the bank run turned into an Apple and Ikea run. People decided that if they couldn't ditch their rubles for dollars, then they'd settle for the latest smartphones and assemble-it-yourself furniture instead.

Faced with this catastrophic loss of confidence in their currency, Russia did the only thing it could do: everything. First, it jacked up interest rates from 10.5 to 17 percent to try to get people to hold their money in rubles that would pay them a lot of interest rather than dollars that wouldn't. Then it started spending its $400 billion-ish war chest of reserves to prop up the ruble directly. And when that wasn't enough, it, well, "convinced" exporters to sell their dollars for rubles and made oligarchs bring their overseas money home to pay taxes. In Putin's Russia, this counted as kinder, gentler capital controls.

The result, as you can see below, was a short-lived ruble rally that has since dissipated. The problem, as Lars Christensen of Danske Bank told me, is that the ruble "should" be worth 75 per dollar as long as oil is around $50-a-barrel. What makes that even trickier, though, is that a currency doesn't fall to its fair value, but rather to the point at which it's expected to move up to its fair value. Markets overshoot, in other words, because nobody wants to buy rubles right before they hit bottom. That means, absent Russian intervention, the ruble would probably be trading around 80 or 85 per dollar, and maybe even lower.

MOSCOW: Russia sold only a fifth of the bonds it offered at its first debt auction since November as investors demanded yields higher

The Finance Ministry rejected 87 percent of the bids received at an auction of 5 billion rubles ($76 million) of May 2016 notes Wednesday. While the government paid an average yield of 15.27 percent, almost five percentage points more than at its last sale of the debt in November, that was still 125 basis points below the yield at Tuesday's close.

"The fact that investors aren't willing to purchase Russian debt at 15 percent interest rates tells you something has gone wrong somewhere," Neil Shearing, the chief emerging-markets economist at Capital Economics Ltd. in London, said by phone. "There's a growing acknowledgment that Russia's public finances are on an unsustainable footing."

France says European Union sanctions against separatists in eastern Ukraine and their Russian backers will be reinforced in an attempt to force all sides back to the negotiating table.

French European Affairs Minister Harlem Desir said ahead of Thursday's meeting of EU foreign ministers that the bloc needs "the maximum toughness" in the face of continued fighting against government forces

"It is the duty of the EU now to prepare options for the future including, I think it's now necessary, the possibility of further restrictive measures against Russia which our leaders could then consider depending on what happens on the ground," he said.

MINSK, Belarus (AP) — New cracks emerged Thursday in a Russia-led economic alliance, with the president of Belarus warning that his nation may opt out of it.

Alexander Lukashenko also sternly warned Moscow Thursday that his nation of 10 million will never be part of the "Russian world," a term coined by the Kremlin that reflects its hopes to pull ex-Soviet nations closer into its orbit.

"Those who think that the Belarusian land is part as what they call the Russian world, almost part of Russia, forget about it!" Lukashenko said. "Belarus is a modern and independent state."

Lukashenko, who has been at the helm since 1994, has relied on Russia's economic subsidies and political support but bristled at Moscow's attempts to expand its control over Belarusian assets.

He was dubbed "Europe's last dictator" in the West for his relentless crackdown on the opposition and free media, but Belarus' relations with the United States and the European Union have warmed recently as Minsk played host to crucial Ukrainian peace talks.

Lukashenko said he wants to normalize ties with Western nations and issued a clear warning to Moscow that it shouldn't expect Belarus to follow suit in defying the West.

In another signal of growing frictions between the two allies, Lukashenko, who plans to seek another term in elections this year, said he warned Moscow that he wouldn't step down.

"As for sending me into retirement, I harshly told them in the Kremlin that they won't succeed in bending me," he said.

Last month, he accused Moscow of damaging Belarus' economic interests with moves to restrict exports to Russia, which he said violated the rules of the Eurasian Economic Union, a grouping that comprises Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan.

On Thursday, Lukashenko warned that if the agreements on forming the alliance aren't observed, "we reserve the right to leave the union."

Belarus, sandwiched between Russia and European Union members Poland and Lithuania, has profited handsomely from Moscow's ban on imports of EU food in retaliation to Western sanctions against Russia by boosting imports of food from the EU nations and reselling the food to Russia.

The Russian authorities have retaliated by restricting imports of Belarus' own milk and meat and banning transit of Belarusian food bound for Kazakhstan through its territory on suspicion that much of it ended up in Russia.

Lithuania is publishing a manual to advise its citizens on how to survive a war on its soil as concerns grow that Russia's intervention in Ukraine heralds increased assertiveness in its tiny Baltic neighbors.

"Keep a sound mind, don't panic and don't lose clear thinking," the manual explains. "Gunshots just outside your window are not the end of the world."

In the event of invasion, the manual says Lithuanians should organize themselves through Twitter and Facebook and attempt cyber attacks against the enemy.

"The examples of Georgia and Ukraine, which both lost a part of their territory, show us that we cannot rule out a similar kind of situation here, and that we should be ready," Defence Minister Juozas Olekas told Reuters.

The Lithuanian army and its paramilitary reserve force have seen increased recruitment since the crisis in Ukraine.

"When Russia started its aggression in Ukraine, here in Lithuania our citizens understood that our neighbor is not friendly," Olekas added.

The government is also considering requiring all future buildings to incorporate a bomb shelter on the premises.

Morgan Stanley is out with a pretty scary forecast, too.

"We downgrade 2015 growth from -1.7%Y to -5.6%Y and revise our 2016 growth from a mild (0.8%Y) recovery to a 2.5%Y recession," writes Morgan Stanley's Alina Slyusarchuk. "The key new assumption that triggers the revision is the signifcantly weaker oil price, combined with a tighter policy response. At the same time, we see risks to our call as being titled to the downside, given the enhanced risk of further sanctions, and concerns over increased state control over the economy."

Unless there's a rebound in oil prices or western-imposed sanction, Morgan Stanley highlights three risks:

"We see the implementation risk that 'top-down' stabilization is undermined by special deals to help particular banks and companies" — weakening the ruble and driving inflation.
Further potential sanctions on Russia "might trigger rating downgrades and index exclusion, which would drive another wave of capital outflows" — again weakening the ruble and driving inflation.
The government might finally introduce capital controls.
Now here's the scariest part of the latest Morgan Stanley report: Although initially analysts and Russian politicians alike were likening the current economic crisis in Russia to that of 2009, the latest Morgan Stanley note suggests this one is could be much more severe

A RUSSIAN bomber intercepted over the Channel last week was carrying a nuclear missile designed to destroy Trident submarines, it emerged last night.

RAF Typhoon fighter jets were scrambled on Wednesday after two long-range TU-95 “Bear” bombers were detected flying over the English Channel.

Sources within the Ministry of Defence last night revealed that one of the two long-range bombers was carrying at least one air-dropped “seek and find"d nuclear warhead-carrtying missile, designed to seek and destroy a Vanguard submarine.

Both Prime Minister David Cameron and Defence Secretary Michael Fallon were alerted after cockpit conservations confirming the bomber’s nuclear payload were intercepted by a Norwegian military listening post, and shared with the Ministry of Defence.

Members of the Russian parliament are creating a task force to estimate the damages inflicted on Russia by Germany during WWII, in a bid to demand financial compensation from the German state almost 70 years after the end of the conflict, Russian daily newspaper Izvestia reported on Tuesday.

The initiative is a direct response to trade sanctions imposed on Russia by the US and EU, for its annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in March and continuous support of separatist fighters in Eastern Ukraine since, according to Mikhail Degyaterov, an MP from the Liberal Democrat Party of Russia, who has proposed the task force.

“Practically, Germany paid nothing to the USSR for its wave of destruction and savagery during the Second World War,” said Degyaterov.

After the Yalta convention the USSR took back some German assets - largely looted furniture, clothes and industrial equipment, as well as some spoils of war - but largely there was no compensation of the war’s economic blow to the USSR,” Degyaterov added.

“It appears that, with all that considered, under the current exchange Germany owes reparations of no less than €3-4 trillion, which it must pay to the successor of the Soviet Union - Russia,” Degtyarev said.

Maybe I just don't understand anything in this life, but it seems that a kilo of nuts can't possibly cost the same as 200 loaves of bread.

Russia's inflation hit 15 percent in January, official data showed Thursday, underscoring the growing economic pain from sliding oil prices and Western sanctions linked to the Ukraine conflict.

Inflation has been shooting up in recent months as a result of a slide in the ruble, which has made imports dearer, as well as restrictions imposed on many food imports from the West in retaliation for the sanctions.

"We think the big jump in import prices as a result of the plunge in the ruble may now have happened," Liza Ermolenko, emerging markets economist at Capital Economics, said in a note. "But the lagged effects will continue to feed through over the coming months and could push inflation to around 17.5 percent or so in Q2."

The surge in inflation is embarrassing for the Central Bank, coming just days after it unexpectedly cut its main lending rate to 17 percent from 15 percent, prompting many analysts to warn that it was taking risks with inflation.

The bank's governor, Elvira Nabiullina, on Tuesday defended the cut by saying that real interest rates — the difference between nominal rates and inflation — remained positive.

That claim has now been quickly proved wrong.

"Inflation is at the level of rates, which is very risky … In theory, they need to raise rates," said Vladimir Osakovsky, Russia economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. "The decision of the Central Bank looks, to put it mildly, premature."

Russian officials have forecast that inflation will reach 15-17 percent in the coming months, but the speed of the increase comes as a surprise. A month earlier, inflation was running at 11.4 percent.

Analysts polled at the end of last month predicted that inflation would reach 13.3 percent in January, with an increase of 2.6 percent month-on-month.

Analysts at Alfa Bank predicted in a note that inflation would stay in the 15-16 percent range until May, adding: "In such an environment, another rate cut should be seen as a policy deviation from the inflation targeting priority."

The Economic Development Ministry revised its forecasts at the end of January to say inflation would end 2015 at 12 percent, higher than last year.

RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman has angrily dismissed a Pentagon study that claimed the Russian leader had Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism.
“That is stupidity not worthy of comment,” spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Gazeta.ru news website.
His comments came after USA Today reported that a 2008 study carried out by an internal Pentagon think tank, the Office of Net Assessment, suggested that Mr Putin has Asperger’s syndrome, giving him a need to exert “extreme control” on his surroundings and is uncomfortable with social interaction.

A columnist for Russia's Vedomosti newspaper, a joint venture between the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, has advised readers to pull their savings out of banks and convert them into physical dollars.

The ruble has tanked over the past year, falling over 50% from 33 rubles to the dollar to 67 rubles at market open Friday. The collapse in the currency's value has helped drive up prices in the country, which is heavily reliant on imports, with inflation surging to 15% in January.

It is better to keep money in foreign currency (dollars more than euros as the US economy is doing better than the EU) and prepare for what many economists are already saying could be a return to the conditions of the 1990s ... It is better to take your savings, or at least a portion of them, out of the banks. Who can guarantee that what will happen next won't be a situation in which all foreign currency deposits are forcibly converted [into rubles] or frozen? After all, the black market in cash worked even in Soviet times.

Bloomberg) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin struck a defiant tone a day after talks in Moscow with the leaders of Germany and France failed to achieve a breakthrough in resolving the Ukraine crisis.
Russia won’t tolerate the post-Cold War global system dominated by a single leader, Putin said Saturday at a meeting with the Federation of Independent Trade Unions in Sochi.
“That type of world order has never been acceptable for Russia,” Putin said. “Maybe someone likes it and wants to live under a pseudo-occupation, but we won’t put up with it.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande met the Russian leader for more than five hours Friday to discuss spiraling violence in eastern Ukraine between government forces and Russian-backed separatists. A breakdown of the diplomacy may strain trans-Atlantic unity in dealing with Russia, as Europe’s consensus on economic sanctions shows signs of fraying.
Ukraine, the U.S., the European Union and NATO say Russia is supporting the separatists with hardware, cash and troops, accusations the Kremlin denies. Russia says Ukraine is waging war on its own citizens and discriminates against Russian speakers, a majority in Donetsk and Luhansk.
Heavy fighting has forced more than 1.5 million people to flee their homes, with some 600,000 Ukrainians seeking refuge abroad since last February, the United Nations’ refugee agency said in a report. The conflict has killed more than 5,350 people since April, according to the UN.
Arming Ukraine
Some U.S. officials and diplomats in Washington are openly discussing supplying weapons to the Ukrainian army, a position that has been rejected by Germany and is viewed skeptically by President Barack Obama. Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said in an interview in Munich that the U.S. could provide defensive weapons to Ukraine.
NATO plans to boost its military presence in eastern Europe risk provoking confrontation, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg Saturday at a meeting on the sidelines of a security conference in Munich.
NATO is setting up military headquarters and command centers from the Baltic to the Black seas along Russia’s borders and plans to ultimately field a rapid-reaction force of 30,000 troops as relations with the Kremlin have deteriorated.
Merkel, Hollande, Putin and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko plan a conference call Sunday to discuss a potential settlement. Amid the cease-fire bid, Ukraine said rebel forces are readying a new offensive to extend their territorial gains in the east

Do you wonder why you're the only one posting in this thread?

No, i don't...it's better for people to read, then to comments on things they don't know anything about

So you're saying that your opinion is the only one that should be seen, got it.

Edited by paladisious: 8/2/2015 06:32:19 AM

Russia Investors On 'War Watch' Wednesday

War or peace? Russia investors will be betting either way on Monday.

The market’s preferable day trade into Russian equities may have impressed last week, but this week promises to be a doozy. Leaders from the so-called Normandy Four — Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia — will sit down yet again to hammer out a cease fire agreement in Minsk on Wednesday. If diplomacy fails, investors holding the Market Vectors Russia (RSX) exchange traded fund will dump, and dump hard.

whenever a cease fire agreement is deemed plausible, Russian equities rally hard. Russian equities are pure momentum plays, because the economic fundamentals are not sound. Sanctions and weak oil prices promise to push Russia into a recession this year.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said today that security in Europe required stable relations with Moscow. “Permanent security in Europe can only be reached together, not against Russia,” he said while addressing the Munich Security Conference.

In typical foreign policy fashion, however, the U.K. is tilting more towards the U.S. than Germany on this one. If no substantial progress is made in Minsk, U.K. Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond hinted that weapons could be supplied.

“We do not think that supplying arms is the right thing to do,” Sky News quoted him saying today. “But if the situation on the ground changes we’ll keep that position under review.”

A leading Russian MP and close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned the European Parliament of an “all-out war” scenario of the United States decides to supply weapons to the Ukrainian government. U.S. President Barack Obama had previously announced that Washington was considering the option of sending lethal weapons to help Kiev.

Alexel Pushkov spoke about the dire consequences before the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee. He gave the warning after Mr Obama said the U.S. was not ruling out sending weapons to Ukraine if diplomacy did not succeed.

An extraordinary letter addressed to the European Parliament and the Council of Europe, among other recipients, reportedly sent from the Russian Parliament paints the war in Ukraine as a fight against Nazism and says Russia is ready to “mobilize all forces” to defend stability in Europe, provoking both ridicule and anger in Sweden, after surfacing there this week.

The sensational letter, signed by the State Duma chairman Sergey Naryshkin, a known hardliner with a close relationship to Putin, warns of a “fragmentation in Europe” and says that continuing sanctions, the crisis in Ukraine, and January’s terror attacks in Paris, jeopardise “the possibility of a peaceful life for over 800 million Europeans”.

Several Swedish politicians have expressed their anger at the letter’s threatening tone, and some Swedes go as far to say that it constitutes a threat of war, albeit one couched in diplomatic language. In the same week that the terms of a ceasefire were hashed out in Minsk over the crisis in Ukraine, Swedes are saying the letter is a way of warning Europe to leave Russia to take care of Ukraine.

Patrik Oksanen, political editor of Swedish daily newspaper Hudiksvalls Tidning, says the letter shows that “in indirect words, they are threatening World War Three in Europe. It is not a direct threat, but another instrument of the Russian propaganda.”

Relations between Sweden and Russia have been growing increasingly tense, particularly in the wake of last year’s hunt for a Russian submarine thought to be lurking in the Stockholm archipelago.