15 Comments
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Tankster's avatar

Hmmm...Neither Trump nor Putin drinks alcohol. Must be a conspiracy somewhere.

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Rudy Havenstein's avatar

Can you imagine if Trump drank?

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I’m A Nobody, Cogito, Ergo Sum's avatar

Seems like history keeps repeating itself. Didn’t the Harvard group under President Johnson formulate how the Viet Nam war was fought. How did that turn out?

At some point in history we need to stop listening to what those “smart” guys from Harvard are telling us or at least get a second opinion. Just thinking out loud.

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Tankster's avatar

It's kind of OT, but what about all these geniuses at Harvard, Columbia, and other "Ivy-Lite" schools screaming, "From the river to the sea?" I'm sure Bill Ackman was serious when he said he wanted the names of these people to make sure they are pushing brooms with their $450k degrees. Some will sneak through, so we'd better learn Arabic and be ready to pay jizya as a Dhimmi, JIC.

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Mike's avatar

Another excellent write-up Rudy. Thanks for the backstory, most of which is not common knowledge.

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Rudy Havenstein's avatar

My podcast with Demetri and Zach the other day prompted me to put this together.

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Stillwell888's avatar

I'm a former EM investment manager and in May 1998 went to St. Petersburg at the invitation of Morgan Stanley for a conference to mark the opening of their Russian office. The first speaker at the conference was the Swedish economist Anders Åslund who said the whole place was about to collapse. The people at MS were not pleased.

As an aside that night they organized a booze cruise around the waterways of St. Petersburg. We went for dinner to a Soviet era building they rented that all the party bigwigs used. As we disembarked from the boat there was a group dressed as the Beatles who broke out into "Back In The USSR". Quite surreal.

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Rudy Havenstein's avatar

Wow. What a time to be there.

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Stillwell888's avatar

It's amazing how disastrous U.S. policy towards Russia has been the last 35 years.

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Marc Schärer's avatar

Disastrous yes. And sadly enough only the first of 3 times since then that the Russian population had their existence wiped due to inflationary bursts caused by external factors and corruption leverage.

But this whole thing might also be an exceptionally well executed long term operation to prevent a Russian rise after the Cold War.

The more interesting question is: if that were the case, did they try the same tactic in China with large scale investments and failed due to the culture and common good priorities?

And if so, what are the paths out of the current situation for Russia and China now that more and more of these things are uncovered or publicly covered?

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Stillwell888's avatar

Interesting ideas. With China everyone thought and believed that if they industrialized and the people became wealthier that it would be a redux of S. Korea, Taiwan, etc. and overthrow the CCP.

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Todd's avatar

Canadian Mint redesigns coining press for the Mark Carney bad penny :) https://youtu.be/ksZxJYhvW88?si=1bl1ekzyXIfDC9bv

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Todd's avatar

Coalition of the Unwilling :) https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/europe-jd-vance-trump-8fc67a79

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