Some time in the last couple weeks, while working on a gizzed-up translation of Ukraine’s balance of payments and exchange rate forecast (you know, the macroeconomic analysis I’ve been updating and alluding to in previous posts for the past, er, five years, about the unfettered laissez-faire mess that is not running like a finely tuned and greased machine, the one I decided to describe to the English-speaking world, whereupon I was seized by a strange and insistent demon who was of the opinion that simply doing one thing and doing it well was not enough, boy, you need to employ a team of seasoned psychologists that would do several things in a kind of backoffice so-so sort of way but it sure would impress the twelve people at Blackrock to whom such therapy would even make any sense, and whereupon I tapped out lines of inelegant Monetary Base hooey until droplets of blood formed on my forehead and I was hoarse from screaming well why the fuck not at a computer screen every time something refused to work – and of course things don’t work during war, things don’t like to work – and on it went until I was sufficiently unstupid to pause and grasp that having something that does one thing well is a good deal better than having many things that are just sort of so-so, and hey there’s all this time in the future to add those things when and if they do work, and I began the relatively swift process of dismantling all those flights of financial fantasy until I arrived at the point I am now, which is ready to publish updates about the mess) I re-discovered the Kyiv School of Economics, which is a unfiscal mess.
I then stumbled on Timofiy Mylovanov and accidentally read this long threaded tweet about HIMSELF on the occassion of the Ukraine Recovery Conference in London. And became queasy.
But I digress. The big news yesterday, according Reuters by way of Uncle Joe, is that Putin might turn us into nuclear dust.
“The threat is real.”
In fact, this is very old news, which we dispensed with on Day 141. This fear has obviously been percolating in the American president’s head, along with unease that the Colorado River might dry up.
Oh, and I stumbled upon Tim Mak:
I also started reading a 100-something page report about the first year of Russia’s all-out war, titled “Russia᾽s War Against Ukraine and the West: The First Year2.”
The report leaves out the part about Ukraine’s president appointing Russian spies to run the country’s security services, which allowed the invaders to occupy Kherson region and much of Zaporizhia region in March 2022. It also misrepresents/misunderstands the origins and roles of so-called “separatists” in eastern Ukraine when the war began in 2014. I was also unimpressed by the bits about BAF and Belarus (pp. 47-48).
Swedish Defence Research Agency (June 2023)