"Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to ..." Sir Walter Scott
George Rebane
As an idle exercise I’ve thought of what most likely is going on with those Russian oligarchs who have had their financial plans upended by all the sanctions and who stand to lose more in the coming weeks/months. Reports are that they’re selling their expatriate assets – land, estates, townhouses, yachts, airplanes, art, securities, … - that can be seized and/or confiscated. So what do you do if you’re one of Putin’s pals worth a few billion dollars, with a good part of it spread around the world, and you find your name on the internationally published sanctions shit list (SSL).
Well, I imagine that their objective is to survive in the post-Putin world with enough money to make their life comfortable wherever they may wind up once the dust settles and Russia regains some semblance of normalcy. Now such a QoL does not require billions, a few tens of millions would do nicely, and even better with a few hundred million. Time to have a couple of yard sales, one in Russia, and one in divers parts of the globe. But now comes the tricky part.
Assuming you do have some trusted agents (relatives?) living in different parts of the world, how do you sell your stuff? Let’s dispense with ill-gotten assets; all your foreign stuff has been legitimately obtained and held in their host countries, with above-board purchase monies paid and transferred through the then world banking systems. But now you cannot sell any of it without payments going through the post-sanctioned banking systems. Any sums entering those conduits of finance could and will be confiscated/frozen; in short, you wouldn’t be able to spend such monies even after a legal transfer of title to the buyers. So what to do?
Well, you would have to sell your $200M yacht to someone for say an above-board $1,000, with your agent having negotiated a sub-rosa payment of $20M consisting of fungible tangibles like precious stones or gold bullion that can be squirreled away out of sight. We’re assuming here that such buyers with ready access to fungible tangibles can be found in the world’s markets. So let’s postulate that you can sell enough of your expatriate assets for stashes of valuable commodities that await your emigration from mother Russia. (I assume that those on the SSL will not be welcome in a post-Putin Russia for all the obvious political reasons.)
After the dust settles, you see yourself ensconced in a luxurious townhouse in Buenos Aires or Santiago. But will you be living the life of ease that you had planned and carefully endowed through a sufficient cadre of trusted agents? You must know that now-expatriate former oligarchs on the SSL will be tracked and monitored by everyone from various intelligence services and Interpol on down. On the more sinister side, you can expect that criminals of various stature will also track and know the whereabouts of SSL graduates. And they all know that you still have considerable wealth in untrackable but readily transportable forms stashed away here and there.
Since SSL members will forever remain exposable pariahs, no matter where they settle, starting with the local authorities, no one will show any great concern if suddenly your wife or one of your children is kidnapped and quietly held for ransom. For now you are a marked man for the rest of your born days. I’ll end this little fantasy by wondering how an oligarch would fare if he decided to sign his in-country assets, or his overseas stashes, to Putin’s Russian state to provide much needed foreign exchange. Would this generate survivable goodwill into post-Putin years? We can dissect this another time or in the comment stream. But we can all depart these musings with the conclusion that today it probably is not much fun being a known Putin toady and an oligarch on the SSL.
Pay Gaps and System D
George Rebane
Frankly, it’s a bit eerie how the events long predicted on RR are ticking off as recently having happened, or about to happen. Here I want to focus on the infamous pay gap of the American worker, and an economic activity that is hard to track, but globally significant.
Income comes in two forms – wages and profits/interest. As has long been argued here, the pre-Singularity years are illuminated by worker productivity abetted by screaming technology advances. Using new gizmos and software, today a worker can make more and/or service more per unit time than yesterday, and even more tomorrow. Given that the size of the markets requiring new stuff and services is not growing as fast as productivity, the result should be predictable for people who think.
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