President Joe Biden issued a speech to the American people this morning
in response to Russia invading Ukraine, as I mentioned earlier,
Russia has launched a full scale invasion in Ukraine including by land, sea and air.
And as Biden had promised he is going to implement some new sanctions,
the question is, how effective will these sanctions be with that said,
why don't we take a quick look at his address and then I'll fill in the blanks.
>> We will limit Russia's ability to do business in dollars, euros, pounds and
yen to be part of the global economy, we'll limit their ability to do that,
we're gonna stunt the ability of to finance and grow the Russian military.
We're gonna impose major and
we're going to impair their ability to compete in high tech 21st century economy,
we've already seen the impact of our actions on Russia's currency and
the ruble, which early today hit its weakest level eve,r ever in history.
Russia's stock market plunged today,
the Russian government borrowing rates spiked by over 15%.
Today's actions, we've now sanctioned Russian banks that together hold
around $1 trillion dollars in assets, we've cut off Russia's largest bank,
a bank that holds more than one third of Russia's banking assets by itself,
cut it off from the US financial system.
And today we're also blocking four more major banks,
that means every asset they have in America will be frozen, this includes VTB,
the second largest bank in Russia, which has $250 billion in assets.
>> So that sounds like a big deal, but there are major sanctions missing from
what Biden is announcing there, so number one issue is that for some reason,
Biden has chosen not to sanction Vladimir Putin specifically.
And the US has not blocked Russia from being part of Swift,
which is you know, the global finance financing system, right,
the the way that financial transactions are done globally,
that is referred to as the quote unquote nuclear option.
No pun intended, because we're dealing with the nuclear power here, but why,
why did he make that decision, and will the sanctions that he announced in that
video, be effective enough in getting Russia out of Ukraine?
Look, we'll see what happens, but
I do think it's important to understand how Wall Street lobbying in the past
has actually weakened the potential effectiveness of these sanctions.
This is reporting from the daily poster that I think is really important, let me
just go through some bullet points real quick, Biden faces a significant obstacle.
They write corporate lobbyist success in shrouding the American finance industry
and secrecy, which makes it far easier for Russian oligarchs and
their business empires to evade economic sanctions.
Law enforcement officials and sanctions experts have been sounding ever louder
alarms, over or about weak transparency and disclosure requirements specifically
in the most opaque corners of the economy, private equity firms, hedge funds,
Shell companies and investment vehicles such as real estate funds and art assets.
These are the things guys that these Russian oligarchs are,
laundering their money in, and so you can talk a big talk about these sanctions,
but if you have these pro Wall Street anti transparency measures,
then they're not going to be as effective.
And if this is what you're going to rely on to try to persuade,
Putin to pull out of Ukraine,
I don't think it's necessarily gonna work also from the daily poster today,
according to the oil and Gas lobbying group, the American Petroleum Institute.
What the country needs to be focused on right now, meaning the United States,,
in the middle of this humanitarian crisis is securing energy security at home and
abroad by expanding more oil production, right?
The United States is the top oil producing country, but this is this is the catch,
they also are calling on the US government not to place sanctions on Russian oil and
gas production.
>> Yes, so guys, the efforts that we've done so
far in sanctioning Russia, most importantly,
they're oligarchs and Putin are mediocre, they're not super weak.
If they were super weak, the Russian markets would not have gone down about
a third of their value, that's a significant blow.
Okay, but are they really strong, no,
if we did the strongest sanctions that have been knocked out already.
And so, it is fascinating that they have not done that because you have to
understand that in modern warfare, yes, there's bloodshed, as we're seeing now
already dozens of Ukrainians killed and cruise missiles, etc.
But it's mainly a financial battle, and so Putin has calculated that he
is in good enough financial shape that he could withstand the battle and that
he thinks that the West is too weak to put on significant sanctions against them.
So, let's lay out why we have not done the strongest sanctions,
including including unbelievably not even touching putting himself no,
come on, that part is obviously week.
Well, I mean, Putin has invaded and he is 100% responsible, but
we don't want to offend him, are you kidding me, is this a joke, I mean,
when are you going to offend him when he takes Germany?
So, alright, so why is America not acting more forcefully?
There's several reasons, number one is, Europe's hooked on Russian gas and
oil, they just starts 40% and they don't and if they and
their super worried that if Russia cuts that off completely, or
more accurately sanctions the Europeans cut off their access to Russian gas.
That they're going to have significant issues, they're gonna have heating issues,
they're gonna have pricing issues, and
it's going to massively affect their economy.
And Putin knows that he goes, you wanna do it there in a game of chicken, and
right now the West is saying no we don't really want to do it.
So that's point one, point two is we're worried about and
get a load of this, these are real numbers that Goldman Sachs
came up with were worried that if we take stronger sanctions,
that it will inflect it affect inflation by 0.25% and the GDP by 0.1%.
Now you're telling me Vladimir Putin calculated wrong,
we're worried about him and
we won't take actions against him because we're worried about a 0.1% drop in GDP.
We're hooked on short term money.
>> Yes.
>> That we've got to get to 15% every year, the stock market's gotta go up,
the G DP has gotta go up GDP can't go down 0.1%, we can't.
Okay, don't no, don't lay a glove on Putin yet, okay, point three, what anna read to
the American Petroleum Institute now they're like, good, take advantage.
We sell more oil to to Europe, that's great, but we don't want to
destabilize the oil markets and we don't want oil sanctions, that is very dangerous
to our business, and we donate a ton of money to American politicians.
So they tell their politicians in America hell and they do.
>> Yep.
>> And then the last point is the one from daily posted a manned mission 1st
the most powerful people in this country,
our guys who are on private equity funds, hedge funds, etc.
If you don't think money is the real power,
you don't know anything about politics, okay, so those guys, some of them,
not at all of them, but enough of them are laundering Russian money.
>> Yep.
>> You think Putin is going to invade and risk all of his hard earned money,
hard stolen money from all these years?
No, if he, the minute he invaded, I was like, his money is 100% hidden,
we're never gonna get to it.
And the hilarious thing is, it turns out he hit it with us and
think about how smart that is because then that hooks the richest
people in America to be his top defenders.
>> Yes. >> So that's why we're not doing strong
sanctions, that's why he's still in swift, that's why we haven't touched Putin's
actual accounts themselves, if Biden wanted to, he says he could pass a law.
In fact, you could do it with an executive order and say, hey, you know what I'm,,
right now, there's a rule that protects all those private equity guys and
the money that's going into them and keeps it secret.
He could easily say they're no longer secret,
you have to at least tell the government, right,
he's choosing not to do that because he doesn't want to offend the bankers.
>> And understand the sanctions that are being implemented are unlikely
because of these, secret banking and
secure secrecy laws that Wall Street lobbied so hard for and accomplished,
the sanctions that are being implemented are going to impact who the most drink.
The Russian people as opposed to the oligarchs, as opposed to Vladimir Putin,
as opposed to the people, who are either aiding and abetting or
carrying out this humanitarian crisis that's now underway in Ukraine.
And that's exactly what we don't want, we don't want innocent people to suffer,
we want the bad actors to suffer, and so this is this is corporate rule.
This is how corporate rule ruins everything, including any type of
humanitarian mission we might say that we want to be part of, I mean, come on.
>> By the way, this is also not new, the part of the reason that we didn't go into
World War two quicker as millions of people were being murdered,
was because a lot of our bankers had deals with the Germans, so they didn't want
to burn their Nazi allies, that's literal, that's historic, you can read up about it.
Okay, so American bankers said,
[SOUND] I'm gonna lose money if you go into Germany,
let a couple of more million people die because I don't want to lose any money.
And from recent history last example in 2018, we actually did go after
a Russian oligarch turns out, he had cornered the aluminum market, and
so when we put sanctions on him, aluminum prices spiked all across the world.
And when they did, they put the fear of God into Western markets and
Western politicians, they're like [SOUND] We gotta be really careful about
sanctioning Russian oligarchs because it could affect us 0.1% and we can't have it.
So we learned all the wrong lessons from that, and the Russians and
Vladimir Putin specifically learned a lesson,
these guys can be pushed around and that's what he's doing right now.