Winter’s Coming

President Vladimir Putin, just like President Xi Jinping, has an unwritten contract with his citizens to run an economy that enriches himself and his cronies. In exchange, his citizens reap some of the benefits and he agrees not to venture into any exotic foreign policy plans of grandeur.

Everyone has always wondered why Putin enlisted so few soldiers for his war in Ukraine and why it was essential for him to call it a “special military operation.” The reason is clear: a growing number of Western-leaning Russians grew up in the post-USSR era and saw how wonderful society and the economy could be if entrepreneurship is respected and you have friendly relations with your neighbors, like the U.S. has with its own in the north and south.

Russian bot farms foster viral influencer programs aimed at the spineless uneducated Western public that knows nothing about the history of President Putin and has never read a single page from his biography. They rely on useful idiots to point the finger at the Western warmongers that forced Putin to invade Ukraine and commit war crimes there, in Syria, in Chechnya, and in any other conflict zone his macho brain has sought to destroy.

It doesn’t matter. As we’ve seen lately, gay people can cheer for a terrorist organization that rapes women and beheads queers, so for leaders and statesmen to put undue reliance on public opinion when a Bin Laden manifesto is celebrated in America is not top of mind for any serious person.

Courtesy: Zerohedge.com, Bloomberg

As you can see, people in America can’t see that Putin’s capital controls over his own citizens, loan restrictions, and other centralized policies, all of the very same actions that would cause marches against D.C. if Biden or Trump had attempted on their own citizenry, are accepted when they are done by the so-called “oppressed victim.”

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How a lunatic billionaire with dozens of offshore accounts and the blood of hundreds of thousands on his hands is a poor victim is beyond me to understand, but maybe Greta can explain it better…

Look at the trend here: the FED is moving away from everything that made sense to them before, and the reverse repo market is normalizing:

Courtesy: Zerohedge.com, Bloomberg

So, how does Putin’s demise help gold?

Putin has sparked the NATO alliance back into contention. The relationships between European countries who thought that peace would always prevail have realized that it’s over…

They are buying energy from the U.S. and strengthening the bonds between them.

European countries, especially the U.K., Germany, and France, have robust domestic economies and aren’t sanctioned.

They can thrive again while Russia has lost the one thing it was good at: exports.

If Putin touches the pensions of his devoted brainwashed villagers who still hang pictures of Stalin on their walls or enlists more soldiers, he’ll really push Russia to the brink of internal collapse.

Meanwhile, the dollar will weaken because America will need to keep spending funds to make sure this war doesn’t spread to a NATO member, and that is a worthy expenditure when you want to avoid an all-out war.

Best Regards,

Lior Gantz
President, WealthResearchGroup.com