Dollar for 99 rubles, the Volozh-Streisand effect, as well as gladiator fights of zukermasks
They brought to the store of constant sales “everything for 99 rubles” … [продолжите шутку сами]
Dollar at auction on Friday has reached 99 rubles – so it seems that “99” will become the main number of the past week. And Google duck generally decided “for simplicity” right away round up course up to 100 rubles. – I assume that the word “HUNDREDS” has every chance to become a trend on Twitter this week.
Interestingly, oil prices are growing briskly at the same time: Brent is already exceeded $88 per barrel, which we have not seen since the beginning of the year. In the old days, the rise in the price of black liquid had an extremely invigorating effect on the ruble, but now everything is mixed up in the Oblonskys’ house – it’s already somehow incomprehensible even what should happen in order for it to perk up somehow?
The Central Bank of the Russian Federation is still swaggering and speaksthat the fall of the ruble does not pose any risks to financial stability. But he decided to suspend the purchase of foreign currency under the budget rule from August 10 until the end of the year (the week before last it was discussed at the level of rumors, and now official confirmation has arrived).
But here, of course, you won’t understand on the fly: to what extent the representatives of the Central Bank say exactly what they really think. In China, out rumoredgenerally banned economists from using the words “problems” and “Chinese economy” in one sentence – well, that’s all … there are no more problems!
More taxation to the god of taxation
Last week, the President of the Russian Federation signed a “long-awaited” decree on the partial suspension of double taxation agreements with 38 “unfriendly” countries. We have examined in detail the consequences of this step for ordinary people in this article.
Briefly, the situation is as follows: everything will very much depend on the response of other countries. If they symmetrically suspend certain provisions of the tax treaties, then the case may be limited to raising taxes on dividends from foreign securities for Russian investors. If someone freaks out and cancels the entire agreement in response, then you can expect all the delights of full-fledged double taxation: then in a number of situations people with cross-border incomes will have to pay tax twice in both countries, without the possibility of offsetting.
SPB Exchange stated on this occasion, something like “sit straight and do not twitch, nothing has changed yet, the tax on American dividends remains at the same level!”. But Tsifra Broker (formerly Freedom Finance) decided to play it safe in the opposite direction: it has already sent out a letter to their clients in the style of “nothing is clear yet, but just in case, we will start with your American dividends now to keep 30% instead of 10%.”
FinEx funds left the Moscow Exchange (and did not even promise to return)
August 9 all FinEx funds stocked up from Moscow Exchange. Gone, one might say, an era! It has already been impossible to trade these funds on the stock exchange since February 2022 – well, now we are being hinted that it will not become possible in the future.
Moreover, the delisting was voluntary and at the initiative of Phinex itself: they still hope to unlock the assets of their ETFs located in Western infrastructure – and for this they need to prove to the local regulators that they have no ties with Russia left (the presence of an official sponsored listing on the Moscow Exchange doesn’t help much).
It is expected that in the event of such an unblocking, FinEx funds will be able to re-list somewhere in conditional Kazakhstan. Well, Russian investors, theoretically, will either be able to somehow rearrange their assets to Kazakhstani depositories; or they will use the help of some special “helper” office, which will purchase ETF shares at a discount from small investors over the counter, and then rearrange them abroad. To what extent this will be a working option, taking into account all the sanctions restrictions, only time will tell.
under this case in our chat there was a small buhurt about the fact that the former “frontmen” of FinEx – Oleg Yankelev and Vladimir Kreindel – no longer appear in company management. A number of commentators immediately concluded that “Phinex funds can now certainly be written off to zero,” but perhaps the explanation here is somewhat even simpler …
Volozh-Streisand effect
Arkady Volozh (Yandex), apparently, hired new “anti-sanctions” PR people – and they decided to weed the entire Internet available to them for ties with Russia. As a result on his personal website (and, at the same time, on Wikipedia), Volozh suddenly became an “Israeli entrepreneur from Kazakhstan” – which, as expected, caused a wave of sarcastic shield-posting in Runet.
Literally a few days after that, Volozh posted his first public statement about the events that began in February 2022. So now he is in a rather uncomfortable position: on the one hand, this statement will most likely not be enough to lift European sanctions from him; on the other hand, the position expressed may complicate the deal on the division of Yandex into two parts (there is a risk of not getting anything from the Russian side at all). It’s not clear how it will all end, we’ll see. (By the way, it’s interesting that everything is written about this at The Bell here.)
Yandexgate: code leak investigation
Remember, at the beginning of the year, a huge database of source code for a number of services was stolen from Yandex? So, privacy engineers have been digging into it all this time and unearthed curious details – which mainly relate to Metrica/Crypta advertising analytics services that help analyze user behavior on the network.
It was previously stated that this entire gigantic array of bigdata is collected and analyzed exclusively in an anonymized form; but privacy experts write that anonymization is very flimsy there – and with due zeal, it can be, well, bypassed. I recommend reading the original study, it is quite interesting there.
By the way, fun fact: in the press write, that according to the legislation coming into force on September 1, Yandex will be obliged to provide the FSB with round-the-clock access to the data of the Yandex Go taxi application. Which, generally speaking, is used not only in Russia, but also in countries popular among emigrants like Georgia, Armenia or Kazakhstan – and all the data is stored en masse on Russian servers, so …
The Yandex.Taxi press service immediately assured that no data on trips outside the Russian Federation would be merged into the FSB – but a number of countries (Georgia, Kazakhstan, Finland, Norway) still tensed up.
Video meme from Zhgun on this topic, unfortunately, is not inserted from Twitter – but you still check it out link!
A chance to switch from a Gmail needle to a reliable, domestic HMAIL
Speaking of cybersecurity: in the wake of the news story about the fact that it will soon be possible to register on Russian resources only from the Russian electric mail, Mail.ru Mail launched service for auto-transfer of letters from a Gmail account from Google to Russian xmail.ru. You can literally port the entire database of your letters from decaying Western servers to native server arrays with the smell of fragrant birch with just one click. As they say, it’s convenient for you, and Comrade Major is pleased! (Or vice versa, lol.)
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Digital Development officially banned employees to use Apple products for business purposes. Guys, in short, drown for Android with all their might!
China without AI is Chn
Once upon a time, the world economy was moving at full speed towards maximum globalization: it is necessary, they say, to try to remove all barriers to the cross-border movement of capital, technology, ideas, and all this so that the invisible hand of the market shuffles everything most effectively and maximizes output per unit of investment resources.
And it was all working fine until something happened. And now many countries have the opposite idea – it would be necessary to reduce the degree of interdependence, especially between countries with slightly different ideas about the ideal political system.
So, USA decidedthat it is necessary to legally limit investment in China’s advanced technologies – artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and other hype topics. Key technologies, therefore, must be developed primarily on star-striped soil, and not on red-striped soil!
Meanwhile, in China, the construction sector continues to be unwell: last week, all started talking about the fact that another mega-large developer called Country Garden with debts of 200 billion dollars is about to default.
Gladiator fights of zukermasks
And to the news from the genre of “billionaire mud fights”: Elon Musk declaredthat he allegedly almost agreed with the Italian government that his fight with Zuckerberg will take place in some kind of “epic location” against the backdrop of ruins that evoke thoughts of gladiatorial showdowns. (Judging by the fact that the word “Coliseum” was not mentioned, it is clearly not about him.)
So far, however, the main battle is taking place on the Internet over how this event will be streamed – both Musk and Zuk are each pulling the blanket towards their platform. But, most likely, they will eventually converge on simultaneous streaming on Twitter / Facebook with the transfer of all proceeds from this event to charity.
Although Zuckerberg continues grumble to Ilon on the topic that “trynding on Twitter is not tossing bags!”, And that there is too much noise and too few specific proposals for the date of the event.
And Elon Musk himself said that although he pulls dumbbells in anticipation of a fight every day right in his office, before a fight, he probably have to first, lie down on the operating table to correct some problems with the spine.
PayPal gave cryptans PUSDA
American payment company PayPal launched your own fiat-backed stablecoin PYUSD. The technical side of them is driven by Paxos, which used to deal with the Changpeng stable of BUSD (until the SEC set on it and forced the whole shop to shut down).
In all respects, PYUSD is similar to the BUSD twin: inside there are dollar deposits and US Treasuries, everything works on Ethereum ERC20, and the option to block objectionable wallets is sewn into smart contracts (like all other similar coins – USDC, USDT, and so on).
Interestingly, earlier in the US, any attempts to release a popular crypt by companies that already have a developed network of users were harshly suppressed (see Facebook with its Libra and Telegram with Toncoins). But Paypal, oddly enough, seems to have been allowed to play with a new toy. I wonder what it’s for?
Maybe SBF is already struggling with the two chair problem right now.
Sam Bankman-Fried from house arrest sent in a pre-trial detention center – they say that he wrote too many letters in small handwriting to the press. Well, they didn’t forgive him for leaking the personal diaries of his accomplice Caroline Ellison to The New York Times – they considered it to be pressure on a key witness.
Good news of the week
Flagship Arsagera Equity Fund last week surpassed its All Time High of October 11, 2021 – it recovered the losses of the stock market and moved on to conquer new peaks. This is not an advertisement, I just like their general manager Vasily Solovyov very much with his approach to life. =) We did it four years ago super long interview even in three parts. Happy for the guys, in short!
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