The oil subsidy 2
Discounted Russian crude oil keeps flowing to India: “It’s amazing that India is buying at these levels because the summer months – June-July – are the lowest in terms of overall demand due to the monsoon. But it seems the…
Winterings in Trans-Scythia
The Dilettante abides
Winterings in Trans-Scythia
The Dilettante abides
Category business
The oil subsidy
The Soviet Union subsidized the economies of some developing nations if they leaned politically towards Moscow and were considered strategically important. Supplying raw materials at discounted prices is one way to provide a subsidy to the buyer. Today, if Indian…
A recognition of reality, not a show of strength
Clara Ferreira Marques wrote yesterday in Bloomberg Elements: Russia’s plan to cut oil production by 500,000 barrels a day next month — roughly 5% of its January output and 0.5% of global supply — was a show of strength. Sorry but no. It was another…
V, eighty years later
The Eiffel tower during the Nazi occupation (1941). “Germany wins on all fronts.” Was it winning on all the fronts in 1941? Possibly, but it wouldn’t be for much longer. Russian hardware destroyed or damaged in Ukraine (2022). Russia is…
Overlooked vulnerabilities
Craig Kennedy, a member of the advisory board at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian studies, has posted a long read on sanctions against Russia’s oil sector, Russian Oil’s Achilles Heel. It’s the best I’ve read on the subject.…
“The most wonderful grassland in the world”
From a conversation with Edward Luttwak published by the Wall Street Journal in March 2020: Ranching has been more than an investment. It has helped him understand the fundamental weakness of post-Soviet Russia. “Between Vladivostok and the North Korean border,…
Pretend it’s voluntary
News from S&P Global Platts on the upcoming OPEC+ meeting (online): Saudi Arabia and Russia… have insisted that they will only participate [in an agreement to reduce oil output] if the US also agrees to production cuts. A condition unlikely…
An orderly reduction now or panic shutdowns later?
Bloomberg ran this column by Julian Lee on Sunday: Here’s what Saudi Arabia needs to do. At the virtual meeting of oil producers… it should give its counterparts — including those who don’t show up — a clear binary choice…
“Regular blood exchanges”
Here’s Sophie Pinkham for The Nation, reviewing The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia by Anya Bernstein: Aleksandr Bogdanov, a prominent early Bolshevik and science fiction writer, investigated the rejuvenating properties of blood transfusions in the…
Nothing like slamming the door on a good deal
A fund manager running a private equity fund out of Luxembourg writes: Regarding what happened on the ground, one can assume that Saudi Arabia had prepared a plan A and a contingency plan before entering the talks. Plan A was…
Contamination 3
Reuters sheds a new light on the Druzhba contamination case: The substance that brought one of Russia’s longest oil pipelines to a halt in April was carbon tetrachloride, a lethal chemical meant to be tightly controlled by an international agreement,…
Bitter fruit
La Fontaine’s fox, the connoisseur of grapes, was all-French, as it were – “Gascon, some say Norman” – and in keeping with his roots, he preferred wisecracking to whining, which his creator appreciated. American shale oil, sweet as a rule,…