Well it is Friday…
VIX is leading…
Catching up to USDJPY…
as Trannies almost retrace yesterday's losses…
But credit's not playing…
and neither are bonds…
Charts: Bloomberg
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1BhTy7b Tyler Durden
Tag: finance
VIXnado Sparks Stock-Buying Panic; Bonds & Credit Unimpressed
Well it is Friday…
VIX is leading…
Catching up to USDJPY…
as Trannies almost retrace yesterday's losses…
But credit's not playing…
and neither are bonds…
Charts: Bloomberg
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1BhTy7b Tyler Durden
Could Iran Be Trading Oil With Russia For Nuclear Support?
Submitted by Joe Parson via OilPrice.com,
With the help of a few former Soviet neighbors, Iran is set to revitalize their crude oil exports after the profound effect of past sanctions.
Not only has Russia offered to provide goods and services in return for Iranian oil, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan have proposed reinstating oil swap deals. Oil swaps in general are not new, as they are often used to optimize logistical obstacles. In Iran’s case, it is the supply of crude oil to their refineries in the north from countries closer than Iran’s own oil fields in the south. An oil-for-goods arrangement has also occurred in the past, notably with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq trading oil for food under the auspices of the United Nations.
However, the sanctions against Iran by American and European countries do not make allowances for any such humanitarian trade. Therefore, coordinated efforts by Russia, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan could potentially bring more Iranian oil into the global oil market. Iran has offered nearly 500,000 barrels a day to Russia to export from their southern ports in exchange for food and electricity generation expertise. An excess of more than 500,000 barrels a day from Iran, most likely directed at India and China, will notably alter regional oil demand requirements.
Sanctions Inhibiting Iran’s Energy Sector
It wasn’t until 2006 that much of the developed world joined in sanctioning Iran, and finally, in 2011 and 2012, they had a notable effect on Iran’s ability to export crude oil and other petroleum products. With limited access to international finance, oil, and insurance markets, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns said, “Iran may be losing as much as $50 billion to $60 billion overall in potential energy investments [annually].”
These sanctions come after prolonged failure of UN nuclear negotiation talks with Iran. Russia, an active member of those talks, often tries to capitalize on its role to proffer access to RosAtom into the Iranian nuclear industry. Originally under the guise of preventing the weaponization of spent Iranian fuel cells, Russia now seeks to offer their services in return for Iranian oil.
Oil Swaps and Modern Bartering
In 2010, Iran stopped more than a decade of oil swaps with Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan. Iran, which benefited from the logistical simplicity, was ultimately making only $1 per barrel swapped, yet OPEC was counting the oil swaps against Iran’s quota. As Iran saw continued surges in oil prices, the $1 per barrel no longer made long term financial sense; talks had mentioned increasing the price to $5, but ultimately failed.
However, Iran’s now struggling crude production and export levels may benefit from these oil swap deals by providing a production incentive. Iran’s ability to keep domestic refineries supplied is key to its ability to optimize transportation cost and increase productivity to pay for Russian goods and services. Although Russia is currently stifled by American and European investment restrictions, they still have supply contracts to satisfy. Unfortunately, there are limited other near-term solutions to meet those contracts without American and European investment in greenfield activities in the Arctic or shale oil basins.
Iran, which agrees to provide up to 500,000 barrels a day for the exchange, is only purchasing what amounts to nearly 14,000 barrels a day of grain. The remainder has likely been allocated towards Russian goods and expertise for the “Electricity Generation Sector.” Accordingly, on Sept. 12, Russian experts presented their plan for the new Bushehr-2 Nuclear Power Plant (NPP). It is likely that the Iranian side intends on paying for these services with crude oil export out of their southern ports. This provides additional utility for Russia to satisfy export contracts with India and China without increasing domestic productivity.
Iran is thus also able to reallocate funding originally intended for goods and services now provided by Russia. This is likely to go towards mitigating sanctions that have caused a decline in new field developments, precipitating a decline in overall production.
In the event that Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan are able to increase their oil production capacity, oil swaps with Iran may become an increasingly common feature to cut costs to supply distant markets. Through bartering, Russia may be able to undercut threats of an American shale oil export boom by offering reduced oil prices to Northeast Asia. Geopolitically, Russia’s support to Iran will place them in a key position to mediate potential future conflicts. However, once Russia is able to supply large quantities of oil via pipeline, Iran’s influence will likely decrease and Russia may force rapprochement to garner international goodwill.
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1BhPqnP Tyler Durden
What Comes Next?
Some investors are clearly getting out of the Fed-generated “herd” trades of recent years… where next?
This year has seen various uber-leveraged hot-money trades unwind… the commodities trade ended in Q1 (and rotated to US equities), EM debt/equity trade ended in Q2 (and rotated to US equities), and HY Credit ended in July (and rotated to US equities)… so now that we are on the cusp of the End of QE, is the US equity market “there is no alternative” trade the last man standing to be unwound?
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1DE4Jes Tyler Durden
When LEVERAGE FAILS and HOPE turns to FEAR
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via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1DE4IXZ tedbits
ISIS Comes To America? Oklahoma Man Beheads Woman After Being Fired
A man who had been fired from a food processing plant in an Oklahoma City suburb beheaded a woman with a knife and was attacking another worker when he was shot and wounded by a company official, police said Friday. As AP reports, while questioning the suspect’s co-workers, investigators learned he had recently started trying to convert several employees to Islam. As the director of news and information for the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City stated, “they have this ISIS thing on their minds and now this guy has brought it to America.”
A man who had been fired from a food processing plant in an Oklahoma City suburb beheaded a woman with a knife and was attacking another worker when he was shot and wounded by a company official, police said Friday.
The 30-year-old man, who has not been charged, stabbed Colleen Hufford, 54, severing her head in Thursday’s attack at Vaughan Foods, Moore Police Sgt. Jeremy Lewis said.
“Yes, she was beheaded,” Lewis told The Associated Press before a Friday news conference.
Lewis said the man then stabbed Traci Johnson, 43, a number of times before being shot by Mark Vaughan, a reserve sheriff’s deputy and the company’s chief operating officer.
While questioning the suspect’s co-workers, investigators learned he had recently started trying to convert several employees to Islam, Lewis said. Moore police have asked the FBI to aid in the investigation and look into the man’s background because of the nature of the attack, Lewis said.
Johnson and the suspect were hospitalized and in stable condition Friday, Lewis said.
Lewis said he does not yet know what charges will be filed, adding that police are waiting until the man is conscious to arrest him.
Oklahoma Department of Corrections records show the suspect, whom The Associated Press is not naming because he has not been charged, has multiple religious tattoos, including one in Arabic that means “peace be with you.”
Lewis said the suspect had been fired in a building that houses the company’s human resources office, then immediately drove to the entrance of the business. Lewis said he didn’t know why the man was fired.
“This was not going to stop if he didn’t stop it. It could have gotten a lot worse,” Lewis said.
A Vaughan spokeswoman said the company was “shocked and deeply saddened” by the attack.
* * *
The alleged suspect, Alton Nolen, 30, was recently fired from Vaughan Foods in Moore prior to Thursday’s attack.
* * *
Whether this is related to ISIS remains a matter of speculation.
Saad Mohammad, director of news and information for the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City, said leaders of the society’s mosque in northwest Oklahoma City are on alert and taking security precautions to protect the Muslims who gather there from any violence that someone might try to attempt in retaliation for the Moore incident. He said the anti-Muslim sentiments people may have could be heightened due to the beheadings and violence being perpetrated by the Islamic extremist group ISIS overseas.
“They have this ISIS thing on their minds and now this guy has brought it to America,” Mohammad said.
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1syJ3hh Tyler Durden
Protecting Power & Privilege Has Doomed Regimes Throughout History
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
The incestuous embrace of privilege and power by entrenched, socially isolated Elites characterizes failed states and brittle, doomed regimes throughout history.
Every system is optimized to serve a specific purpose. As noted in my recent essay What Metric Are We Optimizing For?, what the system optimizes is rarely explicitly stated.
Sometimes this results from not understanding the metric that the system is designed to optimize; but in other cases, explicitly describing what the system optimizes would trigger social instability.
The Status Quo around the world–from France to China to the U.S.–is optimized to protect its Elites and the sprawling Upper-Caste of academics, managers, think-tank toadies, technocrats, apparatchiks, functionaries, factotums, lackeys and apologists who serve the Elites, and are well-paid for enforcing the Status Quo on the disenfranchized castes below.
Demographer Joel Kotkin, author of the new book The New Class Conflict, has coined the word Clerisy to describe what I have been calling the Upper Caste:America's new class system.
Oligarchs are assisted in their control by what Kotkin calls the "clerisy" class — an amalgam of academics, media and government employees who play the role that medieval clergy once played in legitimizing the powerful, and in implementing their policies while quelling resistance from the masses. The clerisy isn't as rich as the oligarchs, but it does pretty well for itself and is compensated in part by status, its positions allowing even its lower-paid members to feel superior to the hoi polloi.
Because it doesn't have to work in competitive industries, the clerisy favors regulations, land-use rules and environmental restrictions that make things worse for businesses — especially the small "yeoman" businesses that traditionally sustained much of the middle class — thus further hollowing out the middle of the income distribution. But the lower classes, sustained by government handouts and by rhetoric from the clerisy, provide enough votes to keep the machine running, at least for a while.
This describes the Savior State perfectly: a centrally planned and controlled government that enforces its absolute control via force, legal regulations and the blandishments of complicity: there's billions of dollars in free money social welfare to buy the loyalty (or at least the passivity) of the disenfranchised and marginalized.
I have often written about the stagnation of social mobility and the rise of a neofeudal arrangement of social-economic strata:
America's Nine Classes: The New Class Hierarchy (April 29, 2014)
The Three-and-a-Half Class Society (October 22, 2012)
The New American Divide (January 25, 2012)
Why Reform Won't Work (February 7, 2013)
When Belief in the System Fades (March 12, 2008)
The political, corporate/financial and National Security State Elites represent a vanishingly thin layer of the American economy and society. America today is the nightmare scenario feared by James Madison and other Federalists: a covertly created monarchical (what I term neofeudal) empire much like the Roman Empire–a republic in name but in reality a highly centralized Empire operated for the benefit of tiny Elites who buy complicity of the masses with free bread and circuses.
The "Monarchical Federalists" Madison and Jefferson feared have indeed established a neofeudal, neocolonialist Empire.
In this context, it is interesting to note that fully 20% of all entitlements (tax credits, Medicare, Social Security, etc.) flows to the top 10%, 58% goes to middle-income households and 32% goes to the bottom 20%. The swag of bread and circuses is remarkably well-distributed, buying off every sector of the populace.
Behind the PR facade of democracy and free-market capitalism, a parasitic Aristocracy extracts income and wealth from a financially indentured class of serfs. This Aristocracy is composed of several Elites which are served by the Upper Caste of technocrats. These Elites and the Upper Caste serve each others interests, a social heirarchy that Hilton Root characterized as a "society divided into closed, self-regarding groups." The slow trickle of the "best and brightest" into the Upper Caste via Ivy League university admission is also a propaganda facade, as Ron Unz ably and exhaustively proves in The Myth of American Meritocracy How corrupt are Ivy League admissions?
The trick is enable just enough meritocracy to support the PR facade. The Ivy League has mastered that balancing act.
These Elites have few if any links to the social layers below. Charles Murray spoke to some aspects of this trend of financial/social Elitist isolation from the debt-serfs and worker-bee class below in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, but the key dynamic that is outside Murray's sociological purview is the stark reality that the Elite class is devoid of any real feeling for or interest in the common good or public weal.
That is, not only have the key institutions of American governance and power lost the memory and mechanics of good governance, the Elites running the institutions have become an inbred neofeudal Aristocracy characterized by an unexamined (and thus deeply adolescent) sense of entitlement to the reins of power and control of the national income.
It's not just the institutions that have lost any conception of good governance– the Aristocracy ruling the nation has lost all interest or recognition of the common good. This is of course not unique to America; the same disregard for the common good is at the root of all developed-world and developing-world failed states.
The incestuous embrace of privilege and power by entrenched, socially isolated Elites characterizes failed states and brittle, doomed regimes throughout history.This is what the Status Quo everywhere is optimized for: protecting those who have secured the wealth, perquisites and power by strangling competition, democracy and social mobility.
If you want to pinpoint the one dynamic pushing the global economy into not just a prolonged recession but a parallel period of massive social instability, look no farther than the social and financial stagnation that results from optimizing the system to benefit the Elites and the entrenched incumbents who protect them from competition and the dispossessed debt-serf classes below.
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/Yktdsk Tyler Durden
Protecting Power & Privilege Has Doomed Regimes Throughout History
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
The incestuous embrace of privilege and power by entrenched, socially isolated Elites characterizes failed states and brittle, doomed regimes throughout history.
Every system is optimized to serve a specific purpose. As noted in my recent essay What Metric Are We Optimizing For?, what the system optimizes is rarely explicitly stated.
Sometimes this results from not understanding the metric that the system is designed to optimize; but in other cases, explicitly describing what the system optimizes would trigger social instability.
The Status Quo around the world–from France to China to the U.S.–is optimized to protect its Elites and the sprawling Upper-Caste of academics, managers, think-tank toadies, technocrats, apparatchiks, functionaries, factotums, lackeys and apologists who serve the Elites, and are well-paid for enforcing the Status Quo on the disenfranchized castes below.
Demographer Joel Kotkin, author of the new book The New Class Conflict, has coined the word Clerisy to describe what I have been calling the Upper Caste:America's new class system.
Oligarchs are assisted in their control by what Kotkin calls the "clerisy" class — an amalgam of academics, media and government employees who play the role that medieval clergy once played in legitimizing the powerful, and in implementing their policies while quelling resistance from the masses. The clerisy isn't as rich as the oligarchs, but it does pretty well for itself and is compensated in part by status, its positions allowing even its lower-paid members to feel superior to the hoi polloi.
Because it doesn't have to work in competitive industries, the clerisy favors regulations, land-use rules and environmental restrictions that make things worse for businesses — especially the small "yeoman" businesses that traditionally sustained much of the middle class — thus further hollowing out the middle of the income distribution. But the lower classes, sustained by government handouts and by rhetoric from the clerisy, provide enough votes to keep the machine running, at least for a while.
This describes the Savior State perfectly: a centrally planned and controlled government that enforces its absolute control via force, legal regulations and the blandishments of complicity: there's billions of dollars in free money social welfare to buy the loyalty (or at least the passivity) of the disenfranchised and marginalized.
I have often written about the stagnation of social mobility and the rise of a neofeudal arrangement of social-economic strata:
America's Nine Classes: The New Class Hierarchy (April 29, 2014)
The Three-and-a-Half Class Society (October 22, 2012)
The New American Divide (January 25, 2012)
Why Reform Won't Work (February 7, 2013)
When Belief in the System Fades (March 12, 2008)
The political, corporate/financial and National Security State Elites represent a vanishingly thin layer of the American economy and society. America today is the nightmare scenario feared by James Madison and other Federalists: a covertly created monarchical (what I term neofeudal) empire much like the Roman Empire–a republic in name but in reality a highly centralized Empire operated for the benefit of tiny Elites who buy complicity of the masses with free bread and circuses.
The "Monarchical Federalists" Madison and Jefferson feared have indeed established a neofeudal, neocolonialist Empire.
In this context, it is interesting to note that fully 20% of all entitlements (tax credits, Medicare, Social Security, etc.) flows to the top 10%, 58% goes to middle-income households and 32% goes to the bottom 20%. The swag of bread and circuses is remarkably well-distributed, buying off every sector of the populace.
Behind the PR facade of democracy and free-market capitalism, a parasitic Aristocracy extracts income and wealth from a financially indentured class of serfs. This Aristocracy is composed of several Elites which are served by the Upper Caste of technocrats. These Elites and the Upper Caste serve each others interests, a social heirarchy that Hilton Root characterized as a "society divided into closed, self-regarding groups." The slow trickle of the "best and brightest" into the Upper Caste via Ivy League university admission is also a propaganda facade, as Ron Unz ably and exhaustively proves in The Myth of American Meritocracy How corrupt are Ivy League admissions?
The trick is enable just enough meritocracy to support the PR facade. The Ivy League has mastered that balancing act.
These Elites have few if any links to the social layers below. Charles Murray spoke to some aspects of this trend of financial/social Elitist isolation from the debt-serfs and worker-bee class below in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, but the key dynamic that is outside Murray's sociological purview is the stark reality that the Elite class is devoid of any real feeling for or interest in the common good or public weal.
That is, not only have the key institutions of American governance and power lost the memory and mechanics of good governance, the Elites running the institutions have become an inbred neofeudal Aristocracy characterized by an unexamined (and thus deeply adolescent) sense of entitlement to the reins of power and control of the national income.
It's not just the institutions that have lost any conception of good governance– the Aristocracy ruling the nation has lost all interest or recognition of the common good. This is of course not unique to America; the same disregard for the common good is at the root of all developed-world and developing-world failed states.
The incestuous embrace of privilege and power by entrenched, socially isolated Elites characterizes failed states and brittle, doomed regimes throughout history.This is what the Status Quo everywhere is optimized for: protecting those who have secured the wealth, perquisites and power by strangling competition, democracy and social mobility.
If you want to pinpoint the one dynamic pushing the global economy into not just a prolonged recession but a parallel period of massive social instability, look no farther than the social and financial stagnation that results from optimizing the system to benefit the Elites and the entrenched incumbents who protect them from competition and the dispossessed debt-serf classes below.
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/Yktdsk Tyler Durden
Ukraine PM Cries "Russia Wants Us To Freeze" As Locals Prepare For A Long, Cold Winter
We would like to be able to commiserate with Ukraine’s US-muppet regime, we really would, but when Ukraine’s PM Argeny Yatseniuk, or Yats as he is known to Victoria Nuland, almost cried in an interview with Reuters yesterday when he pleaded that “[Russia] wants us to freeze… This is the aim and this is another trump card in Russian hands…. So, except military offense, except military operation against Ukraine, they have another trump card, which is energy”. we have just two things to say to him: i) he is absolutely correct, about Russia having the trump card that is – something obvious to everyone with half a brain from the start of the conflict, and ii) perhaps Ukraine should finally pay Gazprom not only for the gas they would like to use in the future, but also the gas they have already used and payment for which is overdue and which the IMF, i.e., the US taxpayer, gave Ukraine explicit money to pay for and instead was embezzled by the people in power.
More from Reuters on how Ukraine finally, with a year’s delay, figure out just what the endgame is:
“The ultimate goal of Russia is to organize, to orchestrate another frozen conflict in Ukraine.”
Russia’s state-controlled energy company Gazprom cut off gas supplies to Ukraine in June because of a row over Kiev’s unpaid gas bill, raising concerns that the country may not be able to cover the peak-demand winter season.
The European Commission is aiming to propose an interim solution to the gas quarrel between Russia and Ukraine at talks it is brokering in Berlin on Friday.
Yatseniuk said there were no official negotiations on it, though he said a plan to help Ukraine secure additional gas “would be helpful for us.”
But while we have absolutely zero compassion for Ukraine’s puppet regime, which was used and abused by their “western partners”, and is suddenly left out to dry, or rather freeze, with an imploding economy and an increasingly more angry population, where the cherry on top will be hyperinflation to follow a very vold winter, we are indeed sad for Ukraine’s ordinary people, who are merely the innocent victims in the ongoing political power struggle between Obama and Putin, and for whom the next few months will be a living hell.
Still, we are confident they will survive: here is how the Ukrainian locals are preparing, according to Bloomberg:
Since Kiev’s authorities started turning off communal hot water supplies last month to save natural gas, people with their own boilers have found unwashed friends on the doorstep armed with a towel and a bar of soap.
Yulia Mikulska, an accountant from the Ukrainian capital, had gone weeks without a hot shower before she visited her brother’s summer house, which is fitted with an electric water heater. “I finally got to wash myself like a human being!” the elegant 38-year-old said.
Ukrainians are resorting to “wash visits” along with school closures and DIY insulation as the nation of 45 million braces for a winter without enough gas. Authorities, already fighting an insurgency in the east, are scrambling to build stockpiles in a country where temperatures can drop to 20 below zero Celsius (negative 4 degrees Fahrenheit) after Russia, the main supplier, stopped shipments in June.
An early winter in Ukraine means the locals will literally have to warm themselves for the next two months:
Kievenergo, which provides heat for the capital, said it may delay supplying customers until the start of November, when average temperatures are near zero, and stop at the end of March. By providing heat for one month less than usual, it will save 5.5 million cubic meters of gas a day.
The Kiev power authority has a modest proposal to the locals: chill. Literally.
Homes will have to be kept cooler, with the thermostat set at 19 degrees Celsius, 5 degrees lower than usual, according to Naftogaz Chief Executive Officer Andriy Kobolyev. Authorities have also warned of power cuts.
Another side effect: students will be dumber, something the “Western alliance” will surely welcome:
In the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, schools will likely close during the coldest months because there’s not enough fuel to heat them. The city has introduced a 6-day week and canceled vacations in October and March to make up the time.
Oleksandr Poltoratskyi, director of an elementary school with 700 pupils in Kiev, decided to forgo a plan to buy laptops and spent the money on a boiler instead. “That way we’ll be sure to have hot water for the kids, even if there’s rationing,” he said.
the biggest irony is that in desperately seeking to avoid becoming part of the new USSR, the Ukraine energy company what few customers it has left to, well, revert to the practices from the old USSR:
Naftogaz’s Kobolyev advised households to revert to frugal practices from Soviet times. They should glue strips of paper to the inside of window frames to keep warm air in, he told weekly newspaper Dzerkalo Tyzhnya. Kharkiv’s city council has called on residents to volunteer to help insulate apartment buildings and pay for the repairs out of their own pockets.
Mikulska, the accountant who showered at her brother’s place, said that installing a boiler is too expensive so she’s been heating up water in an electric tea kettle to wash herself and her 9-year-old daughter. She managed to color her hair using a kettle to rinse out the dye. If there’s a power cut, she says she won’t have any heat at all.
The bottom line:
“Imagine washing your child if there’s no heating,” she said. “Now that there’s some sun we can dry things, but later, if our heaters are cold, what are we going to do?”
Well, one thing you can do is go to the parliament, and protest, demanding a change in the government – one which actually prioritizes the best interests of its own people, not those of some burecrats a few thousand miles away. After all isn’t that what got Ukraine in this sorded situation in the first place?
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1syJ0SF Tyler Durden
Ukraine PM Cries “Russia Wants Us To Freeze” As Locals Prepare For A Long, Cold Winter
We would like to be able to commiserate with Ukraine’s US-muppet regime, we really would, but when Ukraine’s PM Argeny Yatseniuk, or Yats as he is known to Victoria Nuland, almost cried in an interview with Reuters yesterday when he pleaded that “[Russia] wants us to freeze… This is the aim and this is another trump card in Russian hands…. So, except military offense, except military operation against Ukraine, they have another trump card, which is energy”. we have just two things to say to him: i) he is absolutely correct, about Russia having the trump card that is – something obvious to everyone with half a brain from the start of the conflict, and ii) perhaps Ukraine should finally pay Gazprom not only for the gas they would like to use in the future, but also the gas they have already used and payment for which is overdue and which the IMF, i.e., the US taxpayer, gave Ukraine explicit money to pay for and instead was embezzled by the people in power.
More from Reuters on how Ukraine finally, with a year’s delay, figure out just what the endgame is:
“The ultimate goal of Russia is to organize, to orchestrate another frozen conflict in Ukraine.”
Russia’s state-controlled energy company Gazprom cut off gas supplies to Ukraine in June because of a row over Kiev’s unpaid gas bill, raising concerns that the country may not be able to cover the peak-demand winter season.
The European Commission is aiming to propose an interim solution to the gas quarrel between Russia and Ukraine at talks it is brokering in Berlin on Friday.
Yatseniuk said there were no official negotiations on it, though he said a plan to help Ukraine secure additional gas “would be helpful for us.”
But while we have absolutely zero compassion for Ukraine’s puppet regime, which was used and abused by their “western partners”, and is suddenly left out to dry, or rather freeze, with an imploding economy and an increasingly more angry population, where the cherry on top will be hyperinflation to follow a very vold winter, we are indeed sad for Ukraine’s ordinary people, who are merely the innocent victims in the ongoing political power struggle between Obama and Putin, and for whom the next few months will be a living hell.
Still, we are confident they will survive: here is how the Ukrainian locals are preparing, according to Bloomberg:
Since Kiev’s authorities started turning off communal hot water supplies last month to save natural gas, people with their own boilers have found unwashed friends on the doorstep armed with a towel and a bar of soap.
Yulia Mikulska, an accountant from the Ukrainian capital, had gone weeks without a hot shower before she visited her brother’s summer house, which is fitted with an electric water heater. “I finally got to wash myself like a human being!” the elegant 38-year-old said.
Ukrainians are resorting to “wash visits” along with school closures and DIY insulation as the nation of 45 million braces for a winter without enough gas. Authorities, already fighting an insurgency in the east, are scrambling to build stockpiles in a country where temperatures can drop to 20 below zero Celsius (negative 4 degrees Fahrenheit) after Russia, the main supplier, stopped shipments in June.
An early winter in Ukraine means the locals will literally have to warm themselves for the next two months:
Kievenergo, which provides heat for the capital, said it may delay supplying customers until the start of November, when average temperatures are near zero, and stop at the end of March. By providing heat for one month less than usual, it will save 5.5 million cubic meters of gas a day.
The Kiev power authority has a modest proposal to the locals: chill. Literally.
Homes will have to be kept cooler, with the thermostat set at 19 degrees Celsius, 5 degrees lower than usual, according to Naftogaz Chief Executive Officer Andriy Kobolyev. Authorities have also warned of power cuts.
Another side effect: students will be dumber, something the “Western alliance” will surely welcome:
In the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, schools will likely close during the coldest months because there’s not enough fuel to heat them. The city has introduced a 6-day week and canceled vacations in October and March to make up the time.
Oleksandr Poltoratskyi, director of an elementary school with 700 pupils in Kiev, decided to forgo a plan to buy laptops and spent the money on a boiler instead. “That way we’ll be sure to have hot water for the kids, even if there’s rationing,” he said.
the biggest irony is that in desperately seeking to avoid becoming part of the new USSR, the Ukraine energy company what few customers it has left to, well, revert to the practices from the old USSR:
Naftogaz’s Kobolyev advised households to revert to frugal practices from Soviet times. They should glue strips of paper to the inside of window frames to keep warm air in, he told weekly newspaper Dzerkalo Tyzhnya. Kharkiv’s city council has called on residents to volunteer to help insulate apartment buildings and pay for the repairs out of their own pockets.
Mikulska, the accountant who showered at her brother’s place, said that installing a boiler is too expensive so she’s been heating up water in an electric tea kettle to wash herself and her 9-year-old daughter. She managed to color her hair using a kettle to rinse out the dye. If there’s a power cut, she says she won’t have any heat at all.
The bottom line:
“Imagine washing your child if there’s no heating,” she said. “Now that there’s some sun we can dry things, but later, if our heaters are cold, what are we going to do?”
Well, one thing you can do is go to the parliament, and protest, demanding a change in the government – one which actually prioritizes the best interests of its own people, not those of some burecrats a few thousand miles away. After all isn’t that what got Ukraine in this sorded situation in the first place?
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1syJ0SF Tyler Durden