Germany starts deploying the Arrow 3 missile defense system near Berlin, providing Central Europe with protection from long-range Russian ballistic missiles for the first time.
So it turns out it was indeed clowns acting like clowns and no deal has been reached, after all.
Shocking!
Oh wait, not shocking.
Great! That’s exactly what I said I hoped was happening, so I’m glad my hopes came true. 
This strikes me as significant economic news. This isn’t just the Moscow Times reporting it either. Evidently the Russian central bank has been selling off significant quantities of its gold. What I thought was most interesting about this, though, is WHO is buying the gold. Evidently, the lion’s share of the gold is staying in the country and is being bought up by the wealthiest Russians/oligarchs. Kind of telling when the most economically literate folks in that country are dumping their rubles and exchanging them for the much more reliable commodity of gold. You’d almost swear they knew something really bad was likely going to happen in the not distant future.
OTOH, if due to sanctions, etc., there are few / no foreign buyers, then domestic buyers are all there is. And even better if the government has to sell the gold at a discount to move the volume they want.
I sure would not buy gold in the US today at today’s spot price. But if I could get some for e.g. 30% off, I’d be interested in a lot of it. And that’s not a comment on my attitude towards the stability of the US currency or the US government. It’s just a comment on my attitude towards getting a 30% discount on a globally traded commodity.
If it’s staying in the country then the Russian government still has it. All it has to do is confiscate it from the oligarchs and sell it again.
Good point. Less a “please buy this gold”, more “give us this money right now and we’ll let you hold onto this gold for now”.
I’d think that those oligarchs buying gold know that and have their ways of getting it out of the country. They might be evil greedy bastards, but they are not stupid evil greedy bastards.
Probably much of that physical gold has already found its way to places like Dubai, Astana, or Tashkent.
That’s true to an extent, but on the other hand I’m sure that oligarchs like Ravil Maganov were equally confident in their own escape plans, only realizing it was too late when they were halfway out a sixth floor window.
Eta: god-damned autocorrect changed his name to Ravioli…
Good point. It’s dangerous work being rich and/or prominent in Russia.
Okay, but if the Russian government has that much power, why bother selling gold? They could just confiscate billions of rubles outright from the oligarchs’ bank accounts and say “Yeah, go ahead and complain or try to emigrate, we are the ones who can send you out a 9th-floor window whenever we want.”
No man is an island and that includes Putin. The oligarchs are an integral part of his political system. You want them cowed and mostly subservient, but not eliminated because they form a useful constituency for a variety of reasons.
Dictators can’t hold power alone. They need the support of the elite - well off, and usually well armed, supporters whose livelihoods, and those of their families, depends on the largesse of the dictator. And those elites have their own coteries, with similar enforced (and rewarded) loyalty to their particular elite. And so on down the chain.
Probably much like feudalism, in this way.
Sure. Except unlike feudalism, the types of elite are distributed. Back in the feudal days, the dukes, earls, barons, etc. held wealth, land, and men at arms. That meant that the king couldn’t just tell the guys with all the swords and spears that they need to march against the guys with all the land and money to take away their wealth because they were all the same guys.
In present day Russia, the guys with the money are not the same as the guys with the guns, which means Putin can tell the guys with guns to take away the money of the guys with money, since they aren’t one and the same like they would have been in the days of feudalism. Doing so would still present problems, but not of the same kind that a medieval king faced.
Largely true but not entirely. Remember Yevgeny Prigozhin and his private army, the Wagner Group? If you recall they kinda-sorta almost staged a rebellion (afterwards Prigozhin himself had a most unfortunate “airplane crash” a few weeks later).
A handful of oligarchs in cahoots can buy off more generals than Putin can. Putin can’t rob more than one (usually unpopular) oligarch at a time without having the oligarchy as a whole come gunning for him.
Don’t most countries already keep most of their gold reserves in New York?
If so, might they be reconsidering the safety of keeping it there?