 So let me put that up on the screen for you, so this is the presentation, we're going to go over these eight different topics, we're going to start with the fact that basically all the optimistic claims out there. Emmanuel, thank you, that is very generous of you. Emmanuel says that he is currently drunk at a Dave bar, he just raised three million, apparently finance isn't awful. That's fantastic. You know, I expect many more contributions like this in the minutes to come, given that you're drunk. I mean, this is the opportunity rate that I have, but thank you $100 for Emmanuel. More importantly than thank you, even more importantly than thank you, congratulations, that's terrific that you've raised the money. I don't even know what the venture is, but $3 million is not easy to raise, so good for you, congrats. All right, so this is like all the stuff that people are using to present optimistic data, so stats. So the first point to make is, if things are so good in Russia, why are the Russians withholding all this information? They're holding foreign trade data, export data, import data, oil and gas monthly output data, capital inflows and all these are all data that was available from the Russian regime before the invasion, before sanctions. Finance and statement of major companies, central bank monetary base data, foreign direct investment data, airline and airport passenger volumes, lending and loan origination data. All that data is missing. So one of the interesting things about this report is they have tried to recreate this data from other sources, which is interesting. And at least from what I understand seems like it's quite robust. On top of all the fact that there's data missing, Putin has been intervening with the central bank, has been intervening with the statistical entity that produces economic data in Russia, has been firing people, kicking people out. In other words, clearly intervening in the production and distribution of data because the data doesn't fit. Here's rhetoric, which is we're doing great in Russia. There's a lot of data that extrapolates in the first couple of months from what happened in Russia and extrapolates that today when we have information of what's happening relatively good information about what's happening right now, there's no reason to. You can see at the bottom of the graph here, let's push this up so you can see that. You can see the things were March, for example, monthly oil revenue was was that high in May it was that low, why are they extrapolating off of March instead of extrapolating off of May. So the optimists, the people who want to present Russia as a success story in spite of the war, a success story in spite of sanctions, are making stuff up. And they're using fake stats, they're buying into propaganda, and they're extrapolating for the first few weeks of the war to what's going on right now and there's been big changes since then. So let's actually look at Russia as a commodity exporter and what that means and this is I think some of the most interesting stuff that this report has to present. And this is what Russia exports. Russia is a commodity export, it digs stuff out of the ground and it sells it globally. It produces gas and oil, those are the dominant and coal, those are the dominant forms of natural resources that they export. Nickel, silver, aluminum, right, this is agricultural, oats, copper, corn, cobalt, iron ore, zinc and so on. This is their share globally. So they have 10% of gas and oil. It's 10%. It's not like the whole world is dependent on Russian gas and oil and we'll get to Europe in a minute. And yet, so the world, if you look at the world, if you look at, I don't know, silver, it's 4%, 4% is a lot, but it's not like the world is going to collapse because Russia doesn't export 4% of the world silver to the world. But the fact is that 60% of all energy, of all revenue to the Russian government, 60% of all revenue to the Russian government comes from energy, from energy, from gas and oil. I mean, 60%. So the Russian economy is totally dependent on Russia's ability to export oil and gas. The rest of the world, if Russia went away, yeah, we would take a hit, prices gone up, they've already gone up. Yeah, we wouldn't collapse. Russia would collapse. And this is part of this myth. The Russian economy is fundamentally weak. The Russian economy is fundamentally vulnerable. Not because of the war, but because since the fall of the Soviet Union, under Putin, under this great president, Putin, Russia has not developed, tech has not developed, even though it has a lot of smart people. It's not developed tech, it's not developed its industry, it's focused all its resources and all its energy on energy, on producing oil and gas, and mining for metals and some agriculture. So the Russian economy before the war was a pathetic, ridiculous, failing, failed economy. Post-war, it is basically on the brink of collapse. Now let's look at natural gas in Europe. Who's more dependent on whom? Because we hear all the time about, oh, the panic in Europe. What is going to happen? What are we going to do? You know, people are going to die of cold when the winter comes and there's no gas. And it's true. You know, there's a real panic right now in Europe. There's a real problem right now in Europe. But what you're not hearing is the panic in Russia. What happens if Europe stops or reduces the amount of natural gas they import from Russia? Russia gets a huge percentage of its governed spending from exporting natural gas. Russia exports 83% of its natural gas to Europe. If Europe stops importing natural gas, Russia does not then have the ability to shift that natural gas and export it to China. The pipelines are not built. The infrastructure is not there. Russia cannot shift the LNG and start shipping natural gas to other countries. Russia has no way to replace the revenue from European natural gas. There's no other source where they can get that kind of money. So if indeed natural gas is cut off in Europe or if Europe reduces its dependency and slowly eliminates natural gas from Russia, Russia is screwed. The Russian economy is screwed. Now you can see that Europe has more diversified sources of natural gas than one would think based on media representation. For example, Russia provides 46% of natural gas, but the United States and others are providing a provided 19%. Norway, which has the most natural gas outside of Russia in Europe, provides 25% of the EU's natural gas. Algeria, Qatar, and they are running around the world right now, the Europeans, cutting deals with all kinds of countries. Israel is going to be starting sending through Egypt, through the LNG port in Egypt, natural gas to Europe. I think the United Arab Emirates is going to start increasing its natural gas export to Europe. So Europe actually has ways to diversify and to increase the amount of natural gas it gets. Russia has no way to replace the revenue from Europe. Just look at this chart here. Let me get it higher up so you can see June of 2022. June of this year, US LNG exports to Europe actually were higher than the amount of gas that was pumped by Russia into the European Union. So US already is exporting more gas into Europe than is the Russia. Now granted, that was I think when the pipeline was shut down for repair and stuff like that. Anyway, this is really, really cool. I mean, these stats are really interesting and I like the title here. When it comes to natural gas, Russia far more dependent on Europe than vice versa. And this by the way is true of countries like Saudi Arabia far more dependent in the United States than we are on them. They only have one resource, oil. They have no military, they have no meaningful military, they have nothing. Troy, Troy Beaton from Australia. Thank you for the 500 Australian dollars. That is incredibly generous. We really, really appreciate that. Thank you. And Emmanuel has come in with another hundred dollars. So you know that alcohol is working on him. So thank you. So we're pretty close to 650, our goal of 650. So only $77 away from our goal, which is nice. All right, let's go to the next slide. This is the, this is a map of the gas pipelines flowing into Europe. You can see, you can see the blue in the middle is Ukraine. You can see the many of the pipelines are going through Ukraine. You can also see that there's an alternative pipeline coming in from Baku. Baku is in Azerbaijan that goes to Southern Europe. That is an alternative path and from Turkey into, into South Southern Europe. That's an alternative path for natural gas. The challenge the Europeans have is to get the natural gas from Southern Europe into Germany, into Central Europe. Notice that none of the pipelines go to France and Spain. France is basically nuclear. I'm not sure what Spain uses, but obviously not natural gas from Russia. So the dependency of natural gas is almost totally Central European, primarily Germany, Czech Republic and countries like that. So this is a fascinating map. You can see all the pipelines that were built during the Soviet era when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. Most of the pipelines flow through Ukraine. It's easy terrain. And then you've got the Node Stream 1 and the Node Stream 2 at the top there that go under the Baltic Sea. And Node Stream 2 is not operational yet. And Node Stream 1 is the one, it's almost a robust one. It goes right to Germany. It is, it is not being in full capacity for a variety of different reasons over the last few months. But you can see how, you know, Russia's pipelines all going to Europe, all going to Central Europe, many, very, very susceptible to, for example, Ukraine shutting them off. Russia not in a great strategic position given all these pipelines. Let's see. This is not fungible. They can just take that gas and instead of giving it to Europe, take it to China. They don't have the pipelines. Now they're building pipelines. The pipelines will get there at some point. They're building it. But ain't they yet? Ain't they yet? So you can see there's a, there's a Siberian, a couple of Siberian pipelines that are targeted at China. But it's going to be a while before those pipelines can replace anywhere near what is right now being shipped to the West. And there's no connection between these, whatever's being built and between the East and pipelines. So a bunch of new infrastructure, huge, huge amounts of amounts, huge, huge dollar amounts, massive amounts of money have to be spent here. Adam, we're going to get to that. That's actually in one of the slides that we're going to get to. So while Russia would like to pivot to the East, like to pivot to Asia, to China, to India, right now, you know, it sends 170 billion cubic meters of natural gas to Europe and 16.5. So 10% to China. And that's not going to change. That's not going to improve much. Right. If we move, if we move to oil, you know, Russia produces about 12% of the global share of oil. The rest of the world is 88%. But most of that is to Europe. 52% of that oil is to Europe. 39% to Asia and 8% to other, including the United States historically, right? For a variety of reasons, we've imported oil from Russia. But if you look at long term where oil production in Russia is going, it's all in decline. They don't have the technology to, you know, beef up production of oil. Oil is declining at a steady rate year in, year out. They would have to make massive investment in technology in order to increase production. The Russians don't have the capital. They don't have the investment capital. And now that Western oil companies that were drawn from Russia because of the sanctions, there's just no way the Russians can catch up. And actually, this is what happened in Venezuela. Venezuela, Venezuela, it has the largest oil reserves in the world, can't produce that oil because they don't have the technology and they don't have the capital to do it. They've kicked out Western oil companies, the people who have the technology to get to that oil, they can't get at it. So, you know, good luck with all the oil reserves when you have no access to them. They're actually worth exactly zero when you have no access to them. Now, China is buying more oil, oil is shipped by, on ships. But China and India, India is also buying a lot of Russian oil. They're getting a huge discount. So there is right now a $35 discount per barrel on every barrel of Russian oil sold to China or to India. So the Indians and Chinese are saying, okay, we'll pick up some of the slack. You can see China's increased significantly. We'll pick up some of the slack from the fact that you can't sell to Europe that Europe is boycotting oil and America's boycotting oil. But we want a discount. We want a discount. And they're getting it. So this hurts Russian government revenues significantly. So if you look at, you know, travel time, and the cost that that implies, you can see, you can see just the crash here. And this is a Euro Brent discount reflects how invasion of Ukraine reversed two decades worth of economic progress for Russia. So you can see how the discount has just happened now, right, just because of the war. Before that, there was no discount on Russian oil. They were selling it in market prices. All right, let's shift away from natural resources and look at imports. This is what's happening imports, right? Major trading partners indicated Russian imports fell significantly. So this is Russia's not disclosing import numbers. So the only way to get these numbers is by looking at all the Russian trading partners and seeing what, how much they're exporting to Russia. But look at how, look what happened to imports collapsed, crashed. Now this is huge, because in spite of the mythology that some people like Trump and others are pretended. You know, our standard of living is raised through imports. We're trading with the rest of the world. When we have robust imports, it means we have capital to trade with the rest of the world and to get their stuff and enhances our quality and standard of living. You can see that China has reduced counter to the idea that China is helping out Russia. China has reduced exports to Russia significantly because the Russians don't have the money to pay for it. So you can only import if you could pay for it. To pay for it, you have to pay for it in a currency that your trading partner will accept. The Chinese accept dollars, they'll accept wands, they'll accept probably euros, and they'll accept Japanese yen. They don't have much use for the ruble. So the Chinese are selling a lot less stuff to Russia because Russia doesn't have the money to buy it. And this is a great sign of the actual decline in economic activity in Russia since the war began. Just a collapse in imports, which suggests a collapse in the Russian economy. This is an example of where do Russian imports come from, primarily from China. You saw that collapse that's happened in China. Germany, of course, we know that sanctions, Germany is selling a lot less and all these countries are selling a lot less into Russia. Where do Chinese exports go? So China is crucial to Russia. Russia is not crucial to China. China doesn't export much to Russia. China doesn't export much to Russia. Russia imports a lot relative to everything else that it imports. But for China, it's a blip. It's insignificant. It doesn't really matter. And you can see it's number 11 on the chart of where Chinese exports actually go. Number one is the United States, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Russia is number 11. All right. We want to look a little bit at some Chinese data. Sorry, Russian data. Official Russian consumer price index, CPI, which we are complaining now is at 9% in the United States and everybody's horrified. Well, in Russia, it's over 20%. And that's the official number. It's probably significantly higher when you take into account what's happening in the actual economy. These are the sectors. You can see that technology has gone through the roof in terms of costs. Technology is up over 60%. Our hospitality services are up over 60%. Autos, electronic electric appliances. If you look at retail sales in Russia, they are plummeted. So Russians don't have the money to go out shopping. This is not a lot to buy because imports have crashed. So there's not anything for them to buy if they go to the shops. Shops are empty shelves. If we look at car sales, car sales again have collapsed since February, certainly since June of 2021. You can see how dramatically collapses from 180,000 units in June of 2021. In this as late as February 2022, about 120 or 100, 120 and now 27,000 actual cars selling in a month 2776, so almost 28,000. And then if you look at by brand, you can see Lexus has disappeared, Volvo has disappeared, basically crashing 100%. What's left is some, I guess, Russian cars, right? Not exactly. What about import substitutions? Some Russians, like somebody like Dugan, were all excited because, hey, imports will stop, we'll have to produce ourselves. Isn't that cool? It affords manufacturers to being manufacturing home. It's called import substitution. We'll build it all at home. To build it at home, you have to have capital to invest. To build it at home, you have to have technical expertise. You have to have the ability to produce. You have to have people who, workers who are skilled. If the skills don't exist, you can't build it home. If the technological knowledge on how to build the stuff doesn't exist, you can't build it home. If the capital doesn't exist, you can't build it home. So if you look at the import substitution, it's, you know, for parts and accessories for motor vehicles, negative 54% in May, motor vehicles never to be 75%. So no, it hasn't filled up. It hasn't made up for the gap at all. And by the way, Putin has been talking about import substitution for years, really since the first Crimean invasion in 2014. He keeps talking about it. He keeps tritting the Russian, I don't know who the, the, the, the, what is department for industrial planning, whatever it is for not getting the import substitution up and running. And you can see that in every field, they are way, way, you know, they just aren't catching up. They can't replace the imports. They're still heavily, heavily, heavily dependent on importation primarily from China, but also from places like Germany. This is domestic industry production volume that is decreased. So the industries in Russia have decreased production. Why? Because they need raw materials from overseas, because they need spare parts from overseas. And by the way, this is true of the military. They can't build T-72s because a lot of the stuff there they import from overseas. They can build new military equipment because military equipment requires chips, microprocessors. They import that. Where they're going to get the chips? So by no standards can the Russian economy replace the lost imports. The lost imports are lost. Again, these are surveys in terms of economic anxieties, new orders, new export orders. Everything is crashing. Everything is plummeting across the board, plummeting down. All right, let's look at, let's look at businesses, you know, over a thousand global businesses have left Russia. That represents 40% of Russia's GDP and over 5 million jobs that have left Russia, left Russia. If you look at, you know, the capital outflows, massive amount of outflows, capital out, you know, leaving Russia. If you, if you've got money in Russia, you try to get it out to Monte Carlo, to, I don't know, to Cyprus, to any place you can. To get it out of Russia out of the hands of the government, out of the reach of the Russian government that at some point is going to get desperate and confiscate your funds. So massive outflows of Russians. Here you can also see, importantly, massive outflow of talent. Now, the outflow of talent is not going to immediately affect your economic success, although it does at the margin. But long term, devastating, according to this estimate, over 500,000 Russians have left Russia since the war began, 500,000. 50% of the 500,000, so we're talking about 250,000 are highly educated or work in skilled sectors such as tech. How are you going to onshore industries if your most talented workers are leaving? 15,000 ultra high net worth individuals have fled Russia. I didn't know Russia had 15,000 ultra high net worth individuals. 20% of all Russians whose wealth is, whose net wealth is over 30 million, 20% of them have left Russia. And of course, when they leave Russia, they take their money with them. I don't know how you ever recover from that unless these people come back and how do you create an incentive for them to ever come back? And once they get established other places, once these highly skilled individuals have jobs in other places. I mean, again, what a missed opportunity for the United States or maybe for most of the rest in Europe. What a missed opportunity would you could be saying right now, the United States has a massive labor shortage. What if the United States right now said, if you're Russian, we'll give you a visa, we'll give you a green card. Let's say you just want tech people. I mean, I would give it to everybody, but if you just want tech people. If you're in tech, we'll give you a green card right now today. Just come to an embassy anywhere in the world. We'll stamp a green card and you come on in. What a missed opportunity. We missed it in Hong Kong. We're missing it with Russia. We're missing it with, you know, maybe there's a reason not to do that with Ukraine. I mean, generally we should do that with everybody, not just Russians. We should do it with the whole world. But how do you recover once these people get jobs in the West? Then I'm going to go back. It's done. It's finished. Wait. The ruble. Everybody talks about, oh my God, the ruble is still strong. This is proof that the Russian economy is doing well. The currency is strong. Well, of course it's strong because they're not allowing anybody to sell it. So they've got these massive capital controls. They ban citizens from sending money to bank accounts abroad, which means to convert it into dollars or euros and send it abroad. They suspended cash withdrawals from dollar banking accounts beyond $10,000. So they can't take dollars out of the country. They forced exports to exchange 80% of earnings through rubles so nobody can hold dollars. So you have to use the dollars to buy the ruble, which holds it up. They've suspended lending in dollars. They've suspended dollar sales across Russian banks. They've encouraged individuals to redeem dollars for rubles and companies must pay foreign dollar debt in rubles. So, of course, you can see here the graph on top is liquidity in the ruble market. There's no liquidity. Nobody can actually sell dollars. Nobody can actually, sorry, sell rubles. They can only buy rubles with dollars. That keeps it up. This is Econ 101. Sure, you can keep your currency at a high value artificially through capital controls. Countries try and do this for a while over and over and over again in the world. And the more capital controls you have, the more control the government has over the exchange rate. And what happens in places like this, and I'm sure this is happening right now in Russia, is that there is a vast, vast, vast, what do you call it, vast black market all over Russia where people exchange rubles for dollar, not at the official exchange rate. So this always happens. All right, and then on top of that, the government is providing massive both physical and monetary stimulus to the economy, which are unsustainable and create all the distortions we know that physical and monetary stimulus creates. The Kremlin is inundating the marketplace with artificial liquidity, both at the federal and at the regional level. And finally, Russia's foreign exchange reserves, as you could imagine, are being depleted because people are taking money dollars and euros and yuan out of the country. They don't want them in Russia. They're taking them out of the country. And they don't want rubles. And all the rainy day funds that they've accumulated over the years, some energy prices being high and everything are gone. And remember, they're not benefiting from high energy prices right now because they're giving a discount to anybody who buys their stuff. Financial markets, look at the stock market in Russia. It has collapsed by nearly 50%. And you can see that while on the day of the war it collapsed and then immediately rebounded, since then it's drifted downwards and it's back to its worth close to where it was on that first day of the war when it collapsed from, you know, 42, 4300 to close to 2000. There'd be no equity issuances since the war started. There'd be no debt issuances, bond issuances as the war started. And they've had one sovereign debt, Russian debt default during that period. If you look at the oil giants, you'd think that they'd be benefiting from the fact that oil prices are so high. No, Rosenfeld, this is the gas company, its stock has crashed. If you look at Grasprom, the oil company, its stock has crashed. Nobody is benefiting in Russia from anything that's going on in the global markets right now. Credit is not flowing to small and medium-sized businesses. Credit, there's a massive credit crunch. In other words, and I'll end this here. In other words, the Russian economy is a basket case. It is crashing. It is standard living quality of life is being decimated. And don't believe the stories out there. Don't believe the Russian propaganda. Don't believe the apologists for Putin. The reality is the fact is that Russia is suffering dramatically from this war. We're not even talking about the number of people that have been killed, the number of Russian soldiers who have died, the amount of military equipment that is being destroyed is truly unbelievable. And this war, Putin's war, will go down as one of the greatest strategic blunders in Western history. This will go down in European history. This will go one of the biggest blunders. I mean, Russian economy is never strong. Again, Putin has not grown the economy significantly since he took power 20 years ago. And now it's just been devastated. So be aware of propaganda both from American sources and of course from Russian sources as well. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran book show. 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