Month: April 2022

Authored by Elijah Cohen via TheMindUnleashed.com,

According to a huge database of U.S. government records recently made public as a result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, encounters with UFOs have allegedly left Americans suffering from radiation burns, brain and nervous system damage, and even “unaccounted for pregnancy.”

There are more than 1,500 pages of UFO-related information in the collection of records, which comes from the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), a clandestine United States Department of Defense program that operated from 2007 to 2012.

The information was never classified as secret or top secret per say, but became more widely known about in 2017 after former program director Luis Elizondo resigned from the Pentagon and revealed to the world multiple now-infamous films of an unidentified aircraft moving in apparently inconceivable ways.

Soon after it was disclosed that the AATIP was in existence, the American edition of the British tabloid The Sun filed a Freedom of Information Act inquiry for any and all records pertaining to the program. 

Four years later, on April 5, 2022, the United States Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) complied with the request by providing The Sun with an additional 1,574 pages of information.

Reports on UFO encounters and human biology are among the papers found in the trove, according to The Sun. Studies on advanced technology like invisibility cloaks are also among the records along with plans for deep space exploration and colonization. The AATIP informed The Sun that certain papers were “withheld in part” to protect privacy.

The Sun FOIAd the DIA 😲

“The report investigates injuries to “human observers by anomalous advanced aerospace systems”.
And the report warns that such objects may be a “threat to United States interests”.”#ufo #uap #uaptwitter #ufotwitter @Akam1129https://t.co/w2QIo1Kkze

— Baptiste Friscourt (@Baptiste_Fri) April 5, 2022

Anomalous Acute and Subacute Field Effects on Human and Biological Tissues is one of the collection’s highlights. Anomalous sophisticated aerospace systems have allegedly injured “human observers,” posing a “threat to US interests,” the report claims.

42 incidents from medical records and 300 “unpublished” cases in which people were injured following purported contacts with “anomalous vehicles,” which include UFOs, are described in the document.

The research indicated some persons had burns or other illness caused by electromagnetic radiation, perhaps caused by “energy related propulsion systems.” 

Unusual car incidents have been linked to brain and nerve damage.

Between 1873 and 1994, the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), a civilian non-profit entity that examines reported UFO sightings, collected a list of suspected biological impacts of UFO sightings on human observers.

UFO sightings have been linked to “unaccounted pregnancy,” “apparent abduction,” paralysis, experiences of telepathy, teleportation, and levitation.

More information may be found in The Sun’s original story on their Freedom of Information Act request.

The better part of a week has passed since local authorities announced on Monday that they would be extending the lockdown in Shanghai “indefinitely”. But despite authorities’ best efforts (or perhaps, because of them) COVID case numbers have continued to climb at a record pace, with Shanghai recording another 20K+ COVID cases on Thursday, topping the 20K mark for the second day in a row.

Authorities reported 21,222 new cases in Shanghai alone on Thursday, marking a 7th straight daily record. For context, the city reported more cases on Thursday than the entire country saw earlier in the week.

The number of symptomatic cases has also increased substantially. Shanghai, the new epicenter of China’s latest coronavirus outbreak, has recorded more than 131,000 cases since the flare-up started on March 1.

According to the latest developments reported by the SCMP, the city has converted conference centers and public facilities into temporary quarantine and treatment facilities with tens of thousands of bunks, adding to the 77,000 hospital beds already set aside in the city of 25 million residents.

Meanwhile, rumors have emerged on social media – sourced from unwittingly leaked military documents – that the military is taking over the city…

Rumors that the military is taking over Shanghai are circulating on social media. State media debunked the rumors, but unverified surveillance footage showed troops are entering Shanghai by train. Netizens on Weibo confirmed that their community was already taken over. pic.twitter.com/Qyl7NPJvWr

— Chu Yang (@ChuYang_Journ) April 7, 2022

…and that the lockdown will persist at least until May.

A suspected leaked document shows that the lockdown in Shanghai will last until May. pic.twitter.com/ah8jivG7Kd

— Chu Yang (@ChuYang_Journ) April 7, 2022

Should the lockdown persist for the entirety of April, China’s GDP could suffer a hit of more than one percentage point, as Goldman analysts determined that every four weeks of lockdown in the city would shave 1 percentage point off the country’s GDP, given Shanghai’s importance to the Chinese economy.

The city has recorded more than 131,000 COVID cases since the flare-up began on March 1. Health authorities are taking no chances, even if the vast majority of the infections – daily symptomatic cases were in triple digits – showed no symptoms, and there had been no fatality in the current wave.

“The battle against the outbreak is still very tough,” according to a Thursday speech by Vice-Premier Sun Chunlan, who had been overseeing the anti-pandemic work in Shanghai since last weekend. “Any sign of relaxation or complacency is unacceptable.”

After sending some 40,000 military and medical personnel to the city, the CCP has issued a call to all discharged and available troops from the PLA in a search for volunteers to join the effort to provide food and other supplies – as well as testing and security – to the center.

Beyond Shanghai, China added a total of 24,101 new cases on Friday, including 2,266 infections spotted in northeastern China’s Jilin province, the outbreak’s second epicenter.

The city and its residents have already endured four rounds of tests involving every single resident between April 3 and April 7. And on Friday, the fifth round of mass testing began.

In keeping with the CCP’s history of scapegoating local officials for lockdown failures, Shanghai removed three local officials in the Pudong New Area for failing to contain the virus, according to a statement from the CCP’s disciplinary committee.

Finally, after suffering one public outrage after another, Shanghai residents were outraged on Friday after footage of a COVID worker beating a dog to death emerged on social media. The brutal remedy was applied after the dog’s owner tested positive for COVID, according to CNN. The beating took place at a residential compound in Pudong on Wednesday. 

Footage of the beating, which is being heavily censored within China, can be found below:

浦东新区曹路镇星海家园，主人阳性被带走，宠物狗狗追出来，被大白活活打死💔 pic.twitter.com/bV1FygCJng

— iPaul🇨🇦🇺🇦 (@iPaulCanada) April 6, 2022

Global food prices have never risen so fast and have never been so high, and as have detailed multiple times in recent months (as this is not simply a one-month, ‘blame it on Putin’ crisis), most recently here, the pieces are in place for some serious tears to form in the social fabric of many nations.

While food prices may be generally seen as an emerging market problem, they will have an effect on developed markets too, something we will see in the upcoming French election.

And as the following table from Bloomberg Economics shows, while Pakistan is already in the midst of a political crisis and Egypt is already coming under financial pressure (along with Peru and Sri Lanka), the surge in food prices is also adding to problems in the developed world.

Nigeria, India, Colombia, Philippines, and Turkey all bear watching, along with Russia…

In fact, as PeakProsperity’s Chris Martenson details below, the inflation riots have begun. Peru and Sri Lanka both are experiencing violence as inflation spirals the prices of basic necessities higher and higher.

We’ve been here before, and recently.

The Arab Spring was a period of social unrest and riots in 2010 and 2011 that was triggered, in part, by spiking food costs.

As Alfred Henry Lewis said in 1906, “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.”

But before pure anarchy comes, society experiences increasing unrest and the erosion of social bonds and niceties. That’s where we are now.

Food prices today are higher than they were in 2010, so the protests are not at all surprising. We can and should expect more of them.

Worse than that, however, is the prospect of actual famine and food shortages.

I expect true famine to emerge by the end of this year, after the northern harvest fails to cover the basic needs of 8+ billion people.

This is yet another reason why you should plant a garden. As if you needed one more, right?

The reason for the glum outlook is not just the loss of Ukraine exports, and probable loss of the planting season for quite a large portion of the Ukraine, but because of the desperate global shortages of fertilizers which have become utterly essential to today’s crop yields.

In this lesson, we learn that converting biologically active and supportive soil into barren dirt was a terrible idea.

By 2030, it is projected that phosphate will reach peak output and then begin its long slow decline. What’s the world plan for this? There isn’t one. Again, this is why local, regenerative farming is so critical to undertake at this time.

Watch the video:

Canada’s banks and financial institutions were eager to do PM Justin Trudeau’s bidding when he called on them to financially excommunicate anybody caught supporting the “Freedom Convoy” of Canadian truckers.

Now they’re being rewarded with some of the biggest tax hikes in recent memory.

To wit, Bloomberg reports that Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland has imposed a “one-time windfall levy” on Canada’s biggest banks and insurance companies, while also permanently hiking their income-tax rate, in keeping with the Liberals’ campaign promises. The new taxes are expected to result in C$6.1 billion ($4.8 billion) in tax revenue over the past five years.

The measures will force banks and insurance companies to pay an additional C$6.1 billion ($4.8 billion) in tax over five years, according to Freeland’s budget plan released Thursday. The new taxes are virtually certain to be implemented because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has already secured the support of a left-leaning opposition party to pass the budget law.

The government’s logic for justifying the tax hikes (much to the chagrin of the C-suite at these institutions) is that the banks benefited from the taxpayer-backed COVID bailout programs. Now, it’s time for them to pay it forward. The government said that massive, government-funded COVID support programs have helped the financial sector recover faster than other parts of the economy, and now it’s time to pay some back.

Of course, Canada’s banks can at the very least look forward to some additional revenues as rising interest rates will help boost their net interest margin.

But ultimately, it’s the borrowers who will suffer, as higher taxes will force the banks to demand even more interest on their loans, effectively creating a double-whammy that will raise the cost of everything from starting a business to buying a home.

Investors who own shares of the big Canadian banks will likely also share some of the burden as their stocks are expected to take a hit, as RBC Capital Markets analyst Darko Mihelic.

• The windfall tax may set a “dangerous precedent that long term investors will be hard-pressed not to notice”.
• “Banks’ earnings move with the economic cycle. By ignoring the earnings downside during a recession and punishing banks when earnings recover, an expectation may build for future cycles, ultimately harming valuations over the longer term”.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that the even higher tax hikes that Trudeau had once threatened didn’t pan out.

While the measures are in line with what Trudeau had signaled was coming, the tax may prompt a negative share reaction for the banks on Friday, as some investors may have either ignored the issue or hoped that a flurry of lobbying from the banks would work, said Barclays analyst John Aiken.

“There was some concern, as imaginations started spiraling, that this was going to be absolutely awful,” Aiken said in an interview. “But it was within what had broadly been put out in the campaign promises.”

The windfall tax will apply to all taxable income earned last year by the banks and insurers.

The windfall tax of 15% applies to taxable income earned last year by banks and insurers in Canada over C$1 billion. That will force them to pay about C$4.1 billion, sliced into payments from 2022 to 2027, according to budget documents.

But the government did not go quite as far in increasing the banks’ income tax rate as Trudeau had threatened to during last year’s campaign. The prime minister had pledged to increase the maximum federal income rate for financial institutions to 18% from 15%.

Instead, Freeland is lifting it to 16.5% but lowering the threshold at which the new rate will apply to C$100 million from an original target of C$1 billion. That measure will mean about C$2 billion in additional taxes over five years, government estimates show.

The big question now: how will these tax hikes affect foreign investment in Canada?

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

For years, there was a great debate about what the future of our society would look like. 

The irrational optimists kept assuring us that we would never suffer any serious consequences for decades of incredibly foolish decisions, and they kept promising that a new golden age of peace and prosperity for humanity was just around the corner.  Meanwhile, others were warning that humanity would soon be plunging into an abyss filled with endless nightmares. 

Instead of a utopian new chapter in our history, we were warned that war, hunger, pestilence and relentless economic problems were on the horizon.

Prior to 2020, to a lot of people it seemed like the irrational optimists might be right after all.

Yes, there were lots of serious problems simmering in the background, but overall life seemed to be rolling along pretty good for most of the population.

But then 2020 came along, and everything started to change.

As I write this article in April 2022, war, hunger, pestilence and relentless economic problems have all materialized.  In fact, things are already so bad in Europe that rationing has now been instituted in some areas…

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has threatened the supply of critical commodities in Europe and thrown global supply chains, which were already struggling amid COVID-19, into complete chaos.

As a result, the prices of everything from wheat to oil have soared, leading to multi-decade high inflation rates in places like Germany and Spain. The supply crunch in Europe is now so bad it’s causing governments to begin laying the groundwork for rationing, with some stores already limiting supplies.

This isn’t Africa that we are talking about.

If rationing is already taking place in Europe, how bad is it going to be for the poorer nations in the months ahead?

Well, UN Secretary-General António Guterres is telling us that “the world’s most vulnerable people and countries” are heading into a “hurricane of hunger”…

UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned urgently of the global consequences of the war as early as mid-March. The breadbasket is being bombed and a “hurricane of hunger” is threatening, he stated. Given Ukraine’s great importance as a food exporter, the invasion was “also an attack on the world’s most vulnerable people and countries.”

Sadly, he is not exaggerating one bit.

As I discussed yesterday, at this point even Joe Biden is admitting that the coming food shortages are “going to be real”.

But even though global leaders are openly telling us that things are going to get really bad, most people still don’t seem very alarmed.

This greatly frustrates me, because this is not a false alarm.

There are 45 different nations that normally get “at least one-third of their wheat from Ukraine or Russia”…

The world’s 45 least developed countries import at least one-third of their wheat from Ukraine or Russia, and 18 countries among them import more than 50 percent. These include Egypt, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. These are all countries that are already dependent on humanitarian aid and food supplies because millions of people are currently suffering from massive hunger.

How are all of those countries supposed to feed their people without that wheat?

I keep asking that question, and not a single person has been able to answer it.

Just look at the crisis that has erupted in Lebanon.  They normally get approximately 75 percent of their wheat from either Russia or Ukraine, and so far they have been unable to procure supplies from alternate sources…

Lebanon, which obtains 75 percent of its wheat from Russia and especially Ukraine, is also desperately seeking other wheat exporters, but so far without success. The government turned to the international community with a call for help. There are now fears of rationing and sharp price increases, which will hit the already hard-pressed population hard.

Meanwhile, the global bird flu plague just continues to intensify.

Here in the United States, the total death toll is now just short of 28 million…

The new cases mean that across the nation, farmers have had to kill about 22 million egg-laying chickens, 1.8 million broiler chickens, 1.9 million pullet and other commercial chickens, and 1.9 million turkeys.

It has taken less than two months to go from the first confirmed case in the U.S. to nearly 28 million dead.

So what will the death toll look like six months from now?

And can you imagine what this will do to food prices?

It is being reported that the price of a dozen eggs has already risen 52 percent since the start of this new pandemic…

Egg prices are skyrocketing as a bird-flu outbreak ravages commercial chicken flocks in the U.S., with the price of a dozen large eggs spiking more than 52% in just under two months.

For much more on this crisis, please see the article that I posted yesterday entitled “20 Facts About The Emerging Global Food Shortage That Should Chill You To The Core”.  I wish that I had sufficient words to properly convey the urgency that we should all be feeling in this hour.  We are heading into a complete and total nightmare, and I wish that I could get more people to understand this.

Mike Adams is sounding the alarm too.  The following comes from an article that was published a few days ago in the Epoch Times…

Food scarcity. Food vouchers. Food riots and flash mobs.

All of that’s coming—and soon, says Texas-based food scientist and “Health Ranger” podcaster Mike Adams, who sees dire events unfolding in America in the short term.

His advice: people need to get prepared now.

Of course he is right on target.

In fact, I have specifically been warning for years that all of these things were coming.

At this point, it is clear that the “great debate” is over.

The irrational optimists were wrong.  There will be no golden new era of peace and prosperity for humanity.

Instead, we have entered a “perfect storm” of pain, suffering and horror.

For many years, society laughed at the “doomsday preppers”, but they were right.

And if you plan to make it through the extremely chaotic times that are coming, I would recommend that you become a “doomsday prepper” too.

*  *  *

It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

Universities (and the students and faculty who populate them) like to hold themselves out as paragons of virtue. But despite the immense financial resources of elite American universities, the overwhelming majority of the instructors who teach their classes are poorly paid, and enjoy little – if any – job security, something that has become a ‘fact of life’ for academics.

But UCLA recently tried to push things to the limit, eliciting a furious backlash from academics, who felt the university was trying to exploit its workforce by attempting to hire an adjunct professor with an offer of “zero compensation”.

Unpaid internships for college students are one thing, but the job posting asked for a lot: the candidate needed to have a PhD and a strong teaching record. As the backlash worsened, the university withdrew the job posting – but not before the NYT picked up on it.

The job posting for an assistant adjunct professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, set high expectations for candidates: A Ph.D. in chemistry or biochemistry, a strong teaching record at the college level, and three to five letters of recommendation.

But there was a catch: The job would be on a “without salary basis,” as the posting phrased it. Just to be clear, it hammered home the point: “Applicants must understand there will be no compensation for this position.”

The posting last month caused an immediate uproar among academics across the country, who accused the university of exploiting already undervalued adjunct professors, and suggested this would never happen in other occupations. Under pressure, U.C.L.A. apologized and withdrew the posting.

But the unspoken secret had been fleetingly exposed: Free labor is a fact of academic life.

Unpaid, or poorly paid, positions are the biggest drivers of the ‘inequality’ that American colleges purport to oppose (even though they contribute to the phenomenon, due to a combination of academic selectivity and increasingly unaffordable tuition). As it turns out, the academics union at the University of California system has been fighting these arrangements for years.

What’s even more unfair than the low – or no – pay is that the instructors typically spend long hours reading dense academic papers and answering student questions.

The union representing contingent faculty at the University of California has been fighting the uncompensated positions for years, said Mia McIver, the president of the union, which represents about 7,000 members. “The fact that it is common does not excuse it,” she said.

The union suspects that the number of uncompensated teachers at the university is increasing, said Dr. McIver, who is also a lecturer in the U.C.L.A writing program. “As of March 2019, we had identified 26 faculty members at U.C.L.A. alone,” she said.

In the California system, the trend seemed to have begun with the financial crisis of 2008, Dr. McIver said. By 2010, she said, “We became aware of people who had been laid off and who were teaching for free in the hopes, without any commitment from the university, that if the work came back they would be hired back to teach for pay.”

Many instructors who find themselves suckered into these work-for-free arrangements apparently regret it later. One woman who taught biology class at Washington University for free told the NYT that she later regretted agreeing to do so – especially after she found that instructors in other departments were paying paid.

Liza Loza, a graduate student in molecular microbiology and microbial pathogenesis at Washington University, was excited to be asked to teach a discussion section about four years ago. She had to do a lot of preparation, spending hours reading very dense scientific papers and anticipating students’ questions.

But she saw the job as her chance to make those discussions more hospitable to women and other students who had been shut out of the hard sciences. She remembered her own experience having professors who were so intimidating that she was afraid to speak, and she wanted to set a counterexample.

She was told that the job was unpaid because it was a professional development opportunity. She says the experience was valuable. “I did get a lot out of it on my C.V., but also personally, as something that I wanted to help make better about the program,” she said.

Then last semester, in her third year of teaching the section, she found out by accident that graduate students in other departments were being paid $1,000 for the same work.

“That was for me a bright line,” she said. “It just seemed sort of straightforwardly unfair once I figured that out.”

Elite Universities have fought to keep the system in place, while at the same time seeking to distract from it by promoting their efforts to ’empower’ women and members of the LGBTQ community.

But like the old saying goes, “you can’t eat prestige”. As surging inflation makes it increasingly difficult for anybody to work for free (including white men and women who are members of the upper- and upper-middle-class), will we see a rebellion of the instructors and “contingent” faculty who keep these universities ticking?

Authored by Michael Shellenberger via Substack,

Emails released through California Public Records Act show San Francisco Department of Public Health lied about data that had been fabricated by city contractor HealthRight360…

Hilary Kunins, Director of Behavioral Health, Department of Health (Left) Gary McCoy of HealthRight360 (center), Deborah Bourne, Deputy Director, Public Health Department (right)

The operator of San Francisco’s supervised drug use site fabricated the number of people who the site allegedly served, according to a San Francisco Department of Public Health executive, whose emails were released as part of California’s Public Records Act.

“I think Gary is just making up random #s,” wrote Dr. Rob Hoffman, Special Project Manager with the San Francisco Department of Health, in a February 8 email to other city employees including ones with the Department of Emergency Management and city homeless service agencies.

Gina McDonald, co-founder of Mothers Against Drug Deaths, filed the public records request, and was the first to report that of the 23,367 drug users who have visited the Tenderloin Linkage Center, just 18 have received drug treatment. 

The Gary in question is Gary McCoy, an employee of city contractor HealthRight360, which is one of the private sector operators of the Tenderloin Linkage Center, which San Francisco Mayor London Breed created last December as part of her proposed crackdown on the open drug market in United Nations Plaza in downtown San Francisco.

The numbers in question were for so-called “meaningful engagements” between city contractors and drug users, many of whom are homeless. Emails between city officials and Linkage Center operators show a struggle over how to measure whether or not the effort is working.

A section of the same email says Hoffman had “concerns about the hr360 metrics. I think they are reporting interactions as meaningful engagements… I observed the HR360 staff and did not see anything that can account for the high numbers of meaning engagements… I think Gary is just making up random #s.”

On February 15, an executive with the Department of Emergency Management, Kay Vasilyeva, wrote, “Adrienne had some concerns about the FEST [Felton Institute Street Team] metrics… Only 229 total encounters but over 200 for both health referrals and linkage center referrals? This must mean there is double counting, which is problematic.”

On February 23, another Department of Public Health employee, Dr. Matthew Goldman, wrote an email to colleagues saying, “After the second & third week there were concerns with HR360’s data, but Gary from HR360 insisted it was valid.”

In response to a request from a reporter with the San Francisco Standard news organization, the Director of Communications with the Department of Public Health, Alison Hawkes, misrepresented what had occurred.

In a separate email later the same day, Hawkes re-wrote a public statement written by Goldman. “Part-way through the most recent reporting period (OP10),” wrote Goldman in his draft, “the TLC metrics team discovered that one of the CBOs was inaccurately recording data on engagements.”

Hawkes re-wrote the statement to read, Part-way through the most recent reporting period (OP10) the TLC metrics team discovered that one of the providers at the site was defining engagements in a way inconsistent with other teams on the site.”

Six minutes later, Hillary Kunins replied to Hawkes saying, “thx Alison! made a few additional edits. I don’t think we should use the terms, ‘incorrect’ or ‘mistake,’ and don’t think we should refer to the ‘privacy area,’ as that has been an internal term, and not (as far as I know) a publicly used description. see below. I do think we need to define meaningful engagement – I don’t have that.”

The emails offer a glimpse into the shared culture of the Department of Public Health and its contractors. One senior Department executive, Deborah Borne, wrote in an email to an employee with the Department of Emergency Management, “I would love to do a real tarot reading for the new year for you!”

*  *  *

Subscribe to Michael Shellenberger’s Substack here…

Russia’s central bank has announced Friday the easing of more capital controls following its surprise policy meeting, exactly a week after it began loosening some restrictions on the transfer of funds abroad, which authorized transfers up to $10,000 – or another currency equivalent – within a one month timeframe. 

“The Bank of Russia rolled back some capital controls, allowing banks to exchange rubles for hard currency once more and for some hard-currency account holders to withdraw euros and not just dollars,” Bloomberg reports of the fresh Bank of Russia decision.

It’s latest among a series of signs that the Russian financial system is stabilizing. As we noted earlier in the day the biggest news out of Moscow was the central bank’s unexpected move of slashing rates by 300bps (from 20% to 17%). And was even more surprising to many is that the Ruble – previously dismissed as “rubble” by President Biden – actually strengthened further on the rate-cut, surging by end of day to just below 80/USD.

Further according to Bloomberg, “Individuals with foreign currency accounts or deposits open prior to March 9 who hadn’t used up their $10,000 limit for withdrawing cash, can receive euros as well as dollars from April 11, the central bank said in a statement.

“Banks can sell foreign currency once again from April 18, but only the foreign currency that the banks received since April 9,” the report indicates. The fresh curbs also included canceling the 12% commission on brokers’ FX purchases.

3/ The Bank of Russia is also marginally easing capital controls on individuals: those who still didn’t manage to get their $10k can do it in € now as well (still max $10k till September). Banks can start giving individuals FX cash, but only from fresh FX since 9 April 2022. pic.twitter.com/GOviSvmwkP

— Elina Ribakova 🇺🇦 (@elinaribakova) April 8, 2022

Meanwhile, the media are claiming that the strength of the ruble “may be illusory” or that Russia has exploited a “loophole” in the sanctions and used “financial alchemy” to “rescue the ruble”.

But as the FT observed yesterday (while telling their readers to “Whisper it quietly…”), “The domestic banking sector also seems to have stabilized, after bank runs in the initial days of the war,” pointing out that “The need for central bank liquidity has faded sharply and the commercial banking sector as a whole could soon end up having surplus deposits with the CBR, the IIF [Institute of International Finance] notes.”