Month: April 2022

Financial Times/Harry Dempsey, Neil Hume, Natassia Astrasheuskaya, and Sarah White/3-29-2022

Gas pipelines from Russia to Europe • • • Click to enlarge

“Payments will be accepted in roubles only. Companies need to understand the changed market situation, the absolutely new reality that has emerged amid the economic war waged on Russia.” – Dmitry Peskov, Kremlin spokesperson

USAGOLD note 1: Perhaps the most important volley fired thus far in the new economic war. Who will blink first? This was the lead article in yesterday’s Financial Times. The other half of this equation is that Russia has threatened to pay its debts in roubles. Thus far, those payments have been made in other currencies, principally euros and US dollars.

USAGOLD note 2: Putin has decreed that “foreign buyers must pay in roubles for Russian gas from April 1, and contracts would be halted if these payments were not made,” according to a Reuters report this morning.

Image attribution: Samuel Bailey (sam.bailus@gmail.com), CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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BloombergOpinion/John Authers/3-3-2022

“We don’t have a Russia-Ukraine deal yet, and getting to one has pitfalls every step of the way. Then there’s what comes afterward.”

USAGOLD note: Some unpleasant realism from Authers who concludes “putting all the technical weirdness together, it looks as though the contradictions that had built up in the market over the last two years, and in the decade before that, are being put under extreme stress by the double whammy of a newly aggressive Federal Reserve, and the worst geopolitical shock in decades.” The gist of his analysis is that none of this going to be resolved quickly or easily.

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