Cold War Reloaded - Der neue Ost-West Konflikt

Zitat von Schill-Latour

Naja, neben Gas bekommen wir 20-30 andere Rohstoffe von denen unsere Industrie abhängt wie ein Junkie vom Heroin - aber hey - wir können das ja mal versuchen, läuft ja gerade so gut : )

Das mag ja sein, aber Ökonomen sind ja auch keine Unternehmer sondern IdeologenWissenschaftler die das große Problem haben, dass sie ihre Excel-Berechnungen hochkomplexen mathematischen Theorien nicht mit Laborversuchen überprüfen können und deshalb darauf angewiesen sind, ein paar Dummekluge PolitikerInnen zu finden, die das ganze an der lebendigen Volkswirtschaft durchexerzieren.

Ja aber Alex, willst Du denn der Ukraine ihre Agency absprechen und ihr verweigern, selbst ihre Souveränität gegen die Vergewaltigung durch einen brutalen Aggressor zu verteidigen?

Bist Du wirklich so empathielos und unsolidarisch?

Ich bin auch moralisch völlig verkommen und emotional verroht.

Schilli. Das ist mit Sicherheit ein russiches Propaganda-Fake. ein paar von denen haben SS-Uniformmützen auf.

Für so dämlich sollte man die Ukrainischen Nationalisten jetzt auch wieder nicht halten.

Da es hier im an anderer Stelle ja neulich so ein bisschen Missverständliches bezüglich der Verlässlichkeit von ETFs und anderen kapitalgedecketen Geldsicherungsvehikeln in Zeiten steigender Inflationsraten zu lesen gab - Hier mal ein längerer Artikel, der recht eindrücklich schildert, warum die Finanzmärkte alles andere als finanzielle Sicherheit bieten, wenn realwirtschaftliche Voraussetzungen - wie zum Beispiel die Energieversorgung europäischer Industriebetriebe - in einem weitgehend wirkungslosen Wirtschaftskrieg verpuffen:

Will Europe Go Down to Defeat Before Ukraine?

During the runup to the financial crisis, your humble blogger pointed out that financial time moved faster than political time. Market players often had better and more comprehensive access to important information than officials did and had strong incentives to act on it.

Zitat von Yves Smith - Naked Capitalism (29.08.22)

By contrast, regulated entities were motivated to shuffle their feet and mumble until problems became undeniable…and then the regulators themselves would too often hope gunshot wounds would magically heal themselves, rather than risk having to answer embarrassing questions by going into emergency response mode.

Compounding these institutional and behavioral issues was the fact that decades of deregulation had produced a financial system that was tightly coupled. That means, in layperson-speak, that when a problem starts, it propagates thorough the system too quickly to be stopped. There aren’t enough natural or man-made firewalls to arrest the cascade. [...]

The reality is the cutoff from Russian energy can’t be remedied with fiscal spending. Government intervention can make it less painful only at the margin. This is a real economy problem and it can only be solved in the real economy, either by getting a lot of that Russian energy back or by getting new energy sources. We know how well the latter is likely to go. The Prime Minister of Belgium was brave enough to say the quiet part out loud, that the energy crisis in Europe will last for ten years.

In theory, the EU could try to make up to Russia. But the time for that has passed. It isn’t just that too many key European players like Ursula von der Leyen and Robert Habeck are too deeply invested in Russia-hatred to retreat. Even if there were blood in the street come December, they wouldn’t be turfed out quickly enough.

It is also that Europe has burned its bridges with Russia beyond just the sanctions. Putin has repeatedly offered the EU the option of using Nord Stream 2. Even with Russia now using half its capacity, it could still fully substitute for former Nord Stream 1 deliveries. Putin did warn that option would not stay open for all that long, that Russia would start using the rest of the volume.

Even with Putin being more dovishly inclined than anyone else in the Russian leadership, it now seems politically untenable for him to agree to let Europe use Nord Stream 2 even if he were still inclined to agree.

First is that most of those who have advocated turning on Nord Stream 2 have suggested doing so in a bad faith manner, just to fill up storage, and then renege on payments. Mind you, EU gas storage facilities are meant to be a supplement. They can’t hold a full year supply. So this idea would just be a stopgap…showing its advocates to be clueless on multiple levels.

But putting that wee EU problem aside, the Russian interest in opening up Nord Stream 2 would be to repair economic relations with Europe. But Europe’s posture is that it still thinks Russia should bow to European interests, as opposed to deal on the basis of mutual benefit.

Second, the outpouring of hatred from ordinary Europeans against Russia, as shown in cancellation of performances by Russian artists and athletes, and even the removal of Russian compositions from symphonies, has led many Russians to wish Europe good riddance.

Third, even as the loss of Russian energy is becoming more painful, European leaders are determined to keep punishing Russia even though none of the past blows have landed all that hard. They are now discussing a seventh round of sanctions. The Baltics have been pushing for the EU to follow Estonia and stop issuing Schengen visas to Russians. If Russians can no longer receive Schengen visas, they would have to get a visa for each visit, and I understand not a 90 day visa but one that specified the time of entry and departure.

However, the European Commission has said the EU cannot halt the issuance of Schengen visas but individual member states can. My impression is that the fact that this idea hasn’t been denounced by any prominent European (even if under the guise of undermining Schengen and therefore the EU) has not gone unnoticed in Russia.

So the outcome seems inevitable: many Europeans businesses will fail, leading to job losses, business loan defaults, loss of government revenues, foreclosures. And with governments thinking they’d maybe spent a bit too freely with Covid relief, their emergency energy fillups will be too little to make all that much difference.

At some point, the economic contraction will lead to a financial crisis. If the downdraft is rapid enough, it could be the result as much of (well warranted) loss of confidence as actual losses and defaults to date.

The reason the September-0ctober 2008 crisis was so cataclysmic was that it was a derivatives crisis. Derivatives generated considerable leverage of the worst real-economy subprime exposures and significantly concentrated those risks at systemically important institutions like AIG, Citigroup, and Eurobanks.

Yours truly does not have a good handle on where supposedly but not really hidden leverage sits now. Even though there has been an awful lot of speculation in crypto-land, so far, its wild ride down does not seem to have done much damage to the critical traditional payments infrastructure (as in the linkages to real economy banks don’t seem to be very significant).

However, a long standing concern is that after the crisis, derivatives were not tamed. The easy and obvious remedy would be to require adequate margining. But high enough margins make derivatives unattractive for most users….and those undermargined, as in ultimately government subsidized, derivatives are a big profit center for big financial firms. Can’t mess with that!

So they were largely moved over to central clearing houses. These clearing houses are not backstopped but are widely seen as too big to fail entities. So they are a possible flash point if the financial system goes wobbly.

In other words, Europe’s trajectory seems likely to lead to accelerating bad outcomes, first in the real economy and then soon in the financial economy.

And it seems entirely plausible that the unwind will become acute before Russia imposes terms on Ukraine or the conflict is frozen, Korean-War style.

And a final cheery note: if things do get that bad, it is hard to see the US (banking and supply chain ties) and China (big loss in demand from a key customer) emerging unscathed.

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