New US sanctions against Russia despise Putin

Following the announcement of the latest decisions on US sanctions against Russia, Putin is on the border to be broken. The lack of adequate peacekeeping left the Russian government without any opportunities. The unwise behavior of Russian rulers on the world stage brings more and more damage to the already weak economy of Russia. While Russian oligarchs can afford losses because of the actions of their representatives in power, the people of Russia are becoming more and more impoverished, and are increasingly struggling with the successes of their rulers' stupid decisions.

The US authorities have announced that they are introducing new sanctions against Russia for the attack on the Russian gas double agent Sergei Scripal in the United Kingdom. The action has put additional pressure on the ruble, pushing it to its lowest value since November 2016. The Russian currency and the price of government bonds began falling early on Wednesday as investors worried about a separate draft bill proposed by US lawmakers calling for sanctions to intervene in elections, Bloomberg reported.

"It is clear that significant sanctioning actions have overwhelmed Russia either on the part of the administration, the Congress, or both together," said Tim Ash, a strategist at Bluebay Asset Management LLC in London. The sanctions envisaged concern the export of certain technological products, such as electronic devices and equipment of a delicate nature that are relevant to national security. There will be an exception for space flight operations, space cooperation and areas such as passenger flight safety, which will be judged separately, said anonymity wise. It is possible that the trade-affected trade will reach hundreds of millions of dollars. From Russia depends how drastic the consequences will be, he stressed.

After the entry into force of these sanctions, Russia will have 90 days to give credible assurance that it will no longer use chemical weapons and allow inspections by the UN and other international monitoring organizations. If not, a second series will be imposed on "Strong sanctions," said Russian airline officials, "not to be admitted to US airports, and even to the end of diplomatic relations between the two countries," the high representative said.

The Kremlin has been notified of this Washington decision yesterday, BTA notes. The British authorities welcomed the news of the sanctions. "The robust international response to the use of chemical weapons on the streets of Salisbury sends an unambiguous message to Russia that its provocative and reckless behavior will remain unanswered," a London spokesman told Reuters.

In addition, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is shocked and disillusioned.

"The further strengthening of economic sanctions against Russia can be defined as the announcement of an economic war." This is what he said, quoted by BGNES.

According to him, this war should be given an economic, political or other kind of response.

A sharp jump in the price of cryptoLooks

Obviously, the situation in Syria, as well as the overall picture of the US-Russia relationship, proved to be positive. CryptoLook prices jumped sharply on Thursday, driven by a 17-percent rise in bitcoin, breaking two borders - from $ 7,000 to $ 8,000, only within the day, Bloomberg reports. This happens when, just over a week ago, the value of the most popular digital currency sank to its lowest levels in five months. After the sharp jump in the morning, the price still dropped, and at the moment bitcoin trades around $ 7,700, according to Coindesk.

Bitcoin achieved impressive growth last year, reaching a record value of nearly $ 20,000 in December 2017. It then began to sink a bit.

Today, thanks to the surprising leap of bitcoin movement, there were other crypto-louds and the whole market grew. EOS rose the most, rising 27% in 24 hours and 53% per week. "Serious money is already on the market," said Jeffrey Van de Leumput, a Cryptocampus analyst. He shares how he was only asked a few days ago to transact 200,000 bitcoin for Chinese buyers, not to mention the entry of George Soros on the market. "Now we will see the start of the real bubble," Lehmut also predicted.

At the same time, there is a serious drop in the price of the ruble. The Russian currency is experiencing its worst week in 1999 - since then, its rate has not fallen as fast as it has been over the past two days. This was noted earlier today by the Financial Times, after a 2% drop from the start of the day, which continued later because of US President Donald Trump's warnings of a missile attack on Syria. 

The Russian currency lost 2.4% of its value only to around 14 pm Bulgarian time today, reaching (prior to Trump's comments) 64.68 rubles per dollar - 10.3% less than last Wednesday, and only in the late hours of the day began a slight recovery . 

This decline is bigger than in 2014, after the Crimean crisis and oil shifts are priced. One dollar was not sold for more than 65 rubles from 2016 onwards - even at the height of the Ukrainian crisis, the weekly drop was never more than 10 per cent, Reuters reported. 

In January George Soros called the crypto-bubbles. Now his $ 26 billion company plans to trade with Cripp assets, Bloomberg reports. Hedge Fund Research. Meanwhile, hedge funds, which generally invest in shares, increased their value by an average of 0.4% over the same period. 

According to the agency, one of the billionaire companies has received in-house approval for trading with Crippot assets - assets that traditional finance managers have avoided so far due to limited industry experience, lack of regulation and instability. Adam Fisher, head of Soros Fund Management's macro investment, has received approval but has not yet made any investment in Crippto assets, Bloomberg writes, quoting people familiar with the matter. Allowing the fund to trade with cryptoLight comes at a time when Bitcoin's price, which is scoring as a marker on the entire currency market for crippled currencies, declined significantly in 2018. On Friday, Bitcoin's value was about $ 6,600, well below the maximum reached at the end of 2017 of nearly $ 20,000. In the first three months of this year, crypto funds, which invest directly in a number of crunch assets, lost an average of 52% of their value, according to

About 167 funds related to crypto-clay were found in 2017, according to Autonomous Research, and 20 were opened this year.

How Western Capital colonizes Eastern Europe

Another East European country can get a populist, anti-immigration and Eurosceptic government - the billionaire's Andrzej Babis' party ANO has had a significant lead in the polls before the Czech parliamentary elections in October. So the country will be in the company of Poland, Hungary and Slovakia.

If that scares you, you should know that there is at least one protective shaft to extremism in the region - Western European capital, writes in a commentary on Bloomberg View analyst Leonid Bershidski. In fact, Western investment plays such an important role in the economies of these countries that nationalist politicians create their country's image of rebellious colonies rather than partners in a major integration project, he commented. In a recent report, Philippe Novochet, Thomas Picquet, and Gabriel, the East European countries have just been called "foreign-owned countries." "Their owners are usually from EU countries (especially from Germany)," they write and add: "So in a sense, the situation is similar to that in which peripheral areas are owned by more prosperous central areas in a large federal state. " For Piquet and his associates, this is not right because it distorts the measurement of inequalities: much of the wealth of one country accumulates in the accounts of foreign shareholders who are not part of the local richest 1%, so the country appears to be more egalitarian, but it also has a number of wider consequences.

Compared to their economic output, Eastern European countries have the largest negative net investment positions in the European Union, with the exception of Ireland, Greece, Cyprus, Portugal and Spain. The last five have received major rescue packages during the recent financial crisis.  Unlike the hit countries hit by the crisis, eastern European economies have come to these positions after they have long attracted more foreign investment than they have done abroad. Foreign investment in these economies relative to gross domestic product is higher than the average for developed countries.

The countries of Eastern Europe were proud of the high levels of foreign investment, demonstrating their openness and sincere desire to integrate into the richer part of Europe. But when the economic storms hit the EU, these countries realized that foreign ownership also had a price. During the financial crisis, local companies have found that foreign banks are the first to cut lending. In other sectors, large foreign presence would mean high unemployment if the country suddenly becomes less hospitable to foreign capital. In Poland and the Czech Republic, one third of the workforce is engaged by foreign companies.
In addition, they are usually the largest, economically significant companies. In Poland they produce two-thirds of all exports, accounting for 42% of the value added in the Czech Republic. The loss of even a small part of these companies would cause painful reversal of economic trends - something Babysh, as a businessman and former finance minister, understands well. Germany, the Netherlands and France are the largest investors in Eastern European economies. The benefits of investing in the region are clear to companies in these countries - they can cut their labor costs without moving production too far from their traditional markets. Semitic governments can hit foreign banks and supermarket chains with special taxes, as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and the Polish government have done, and Babysh will probably do if he gets to power but only to a certain extent - if you overdo it, foreigners can decide to leave.

The Hungarian, Polish and Czech governments refuse to implement EU resettlement allowances and respond in a challenging way when their efforts to control the judiciary are criticized - "We will not be a colony," Orban and the leader of the ruling party in Poland Jaroslaw Kaczynski representatives of the EU in individual cases. However, this will not actually change their status as de facto economic colonies of the richer West unless their populist governments decide to confiscate foreign companies - and that is unthinkable. Czech President Milos Zeman recently said that it might be better to lose European subsidies - such as Western Europe threatens to move - than to be forced to accept Muslim migrants. The real threat, however, is not the loss of subsidies - it would come from the allegations of foreign business from changes in the business climate. The dismantling of cohesion in the EU, and in particular the resistances of the European courts' decisions implementing the Union's policies, over time may lead to it because they would weaken the protection of Western European investors. Orban, who has been in power for longer than his ideological allies in neighboring countries, understands this well - several times he has mitigated his policies as a result of European court rulings. Orban has not directly attacked the latest ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union, which has obliged Eastern European countries to participate in the Resettlement Block. Nationalist rhetoric may mislead some voters that their leaders are truly independent. But the choice faced by politicians in Eastern Europe is ultimately clear: either they will be satisfied with mostly seeming revolts or they have to raise bets and risk losing the investments that their economies depend on.
In fact, it is not even a matter of choice - after all, Eastern Europe will have to fight for integration, as it once struggled for membership, Bershidskiy said. His personal opinion is that in the end it will not matter where a European company is based because a united Europe will have a common budget and economic cohesion will become inevitable. Nationalism may be gaining power, but it is too late - Eastern European countries have been open to investors for too long and have lost too much control of their economic future to exercise political control.