All news
Elon Musk's Cybertaxi, and New Laws from a Crazy Printer
All the most important and interesting financial news in Russia and the world this week: 97 rubles per dollar, childlessness tax, confiscation of immigrants, deterioration of citizenship, Unilever left Russia, bloody feud over Wildberry, RKN slows down, Nobel Prize AI, Cryptocurrency FBI Traders and new information about Probusinessbank.
🐌 Last week, the ruble continued its sharp decline. Until Friday, the Central Bank valued the dollar at 97 rubles. (At the end of September, this figure was about 5% lower). At the same time, the government relaxed requirements for the import sale of foreign currency for exporters. This will not contribute to the strengthening of the ruble.
Positive release about divorce is back with us
🐌 The Central Bank has resumed the dark issue of additional shares of Positive Technologies with signs that it may not be beneficial to minority shareholders. Apparently, they figured out how to stage it all to make it look better. Alexander Eliseev is not happy about this (read more about his situation here).
🐌 By the way, Finindi also has a great post comparing the "average" consumer basket of Russians used to calculate inflation with Alexander's own spending structure (of course, he belongs to the middle class).
Abstract Russians in a vacuum spend a lot of money on food, cars and utilities, but travel very modestly, educate themselves and give gifts. Different consumer baskets will make inflation feel a little different on your skin!
Lawmakers' strange thoughts about the new law. Some of them may eventually become actual laws.
🖨Andrey Gurulev (member of the National Defense Committee) wants to introduce a tax on childlessness. Why exactly does your child need it? I think it's pretty clear.
/>
Gurulev looks at you as if he wants to say, “LISTEN, GIVE BIRTH!”
🖨 The State Council of Tatarstan sleeps and watches as they begin to confiscate the property of immigrants who act "against the interests of the state." The Cabinet of Ministers commented positively on the bill, but explained that the range of possible offenses against Russia "is not limited to the norms listed in the bill" and that the list needs to be expanded.
🖨 A bill has been submitted to the State Duma that would make foreign citizenship an aggravating circumstance when committing a crime. Lawyers timidly ask: "But... what about the Constitution?... What about equality before the law?"
🐌Unilever sells its Russian business for 500 million euros. Knorr cubes and Axe deodorants are now completely Russian products. The buyer was Arnest Group, which had previously successfully acquired the Russian brewery Heineken for 1 euro and 100 million euros of debt. Agree, these guys have business sense!
🐌 Meanwhile, the Russian government is tightening the conditions for foreigners to sell their businesses in Russia. Previously, it was supposed to sell their Russian business to “those who need it” at a 50% discount from the market price plus 15% of the budget, but now you have to give a 60% discount and pay 35%. A deal for your budget. It turns out that the total discount on foreign shipments was 74% of the market value (a separate question is how it was determined). You see, soon foreign investors will have to pay extra out of their own pockets for the deprivation of Russian assets! 🤔
🐌 Kadyrov threatened two State Duma deputies and a senator with bloody reprisals over the Wildberry incident. The first video of the delegates' apologies appeared the very next day. (After the previous news, you probably wanted to ask: "Why do foreigners pay extra to stay out of Russian business?" Haha, I mean, oh.)
🐌 Roskomnadzor has blocked Discord in Russia. Press F! At the same time, the bigwigs of RKN presented a legal justification for slowing down the online resource without a court decision (based on an extrajudicial decision of the prosecutor's office). And if you think about it, blocking is a kind of "100% slowdown", right? 🤔
🐌Hedge fund "Business Killer" Hindenburg accused gaming company Roblox of inflating its user statistics and ignoring child safety. The report contained "gross profanity, pornography, violent content, and extremely offensive language." Guys, are we talking about Twitter?? Either way, the company's stock price briefly fell by 9%, then rose again. Maybe the "hell" of this business is not so scary?
🐌70% of Denmark's GDP growth comes from the pharmaceutical industry. Who said "Ozempic"? By the way, are there any injectables among my subscribers?
To leave no doubt about the interior, the steering wheel and pedals were specially cut out. When this wonder weapon finally works, only Elon's Grock AI will be behind the wheel. Currently, Tesla's autopilot requires the driver to always firmly touch the steering wheel and check. No matter what happens, isn't it time to hand over control to the hardware?
🐌 The Nobel Prize in Physics was unexpectedly awarded "for AI" to Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield. Why physics? Well, Nobel never thought of inventing a category "For Artificial Intelligence" in 1901... In his speech, Hinton said: He said that his student recently almost fired Sam Altman from OpenAI. I'm proud of that. Simply put, our elephants!
/>
Geoffrey Hinton. What's on your face, that you think Sam Altman from OpenAI wasn't squeezed out after all...
🐌 However, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was also awarded for teaching a neural network to predict protein structure. How soon do you think this prize will turn into "awarding small researchers in all scientific fields"?
🐌FBI agents created fake cryptocurrencies to catch people manipulating cryptocurrency prices. They turned out to be people with Russian roots, led by Alexey Andryunin (crypto company Gotbit). Interestingly, the FBI was also able to collect $25 million. Isn't it time for them to retrain as crypto traders?
/>
Alexey Andryunin seems like a person who lives life clearly.
🐌A court has approved a payment plan for affected clients of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, compensating them for 118% of the dollar equivalent of their losses. Understandably, people who traded bitcoin on the exchanges are unhappy, as the cryptocurrency has grown significantly since then.
🐌Our old friend Dima Nikitenko unexpectedly released a book on investing. Dima has long been the author of the most suitable free online investment courses on the RuNet, removed them from paid access and now supplements them with new materials, releasing them in book form 14 times. (!) It's cheap. I highly recommend it to everyone and I myself admire Nikitenko's painstaking approach. The world would be a better place if there were more such financial bloggers.
/>
The cover, sorry, looks like an "information product", but the content inside is extremely useful, so don't be confused by the first impression =)
🐌Plyushchev's talk about Probusinessbank-vorota. (Sorry, I didn't have time to listen to the podcast, but this time I needed this section in my video digest to throw out some negative energy on this topic. For those who are interested, here is a link with a time code to my last stream: You can check the link: Thoughts on PBB)
For those of you who are interested in this topic, we have collected all the relevant links about Probusinessbank in this post. Unfortunately, I posted almost all the information on Twitter and have already created 5 long threads there. I understand that not everyone finds it convenient to read there, but unfortunately, there is no other option yet. A very brief summary: yes, everything points to the fact that Probusinessbank bankers simply cleverly stole money from there.
🐌 Many people report receiving additional compensation in their brokerage accounts for assets blocked in the exchange. Have you checked if you have accumulated points?