Hacking the ruble

Max and Stacy on the ruble crisis.

This is what got my attention: 

"David Cameron in question time (in Parliament) said "he has hacked the ruble. Hey got nowhere on the ground trying to invade Russia via the Ukraine, so now he's going to attack them in the currency market". This is currency war."

Keiser Report: Ruble’s Baptism by Fire

Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert are joined by Liam Halligan of BNE.eu. They talk rubles, sanctions and diversifying the economy with some technology investments. In the second half, Max interviews Konstantin Gurdgiev about the ruble, the Russian budget and David Cameron’s take on the causes and consequences of the crisis and sanctions. They also discuss the ruble’s ‘baptism by fire’ as it only just joined the five trillion dollar per day forex markets

I had come to a similar conclusion on hearing Cameron on a video segment - so I have tried to find it

Russia not fit to be part of international financial system – Cameron

RT,

17 December, 2014

The combined effect produced by Western sanctions and low oil prices proves that there’s no place for Russia in the international financial system, believes British prime minister David Cameron, urging for more pressure on Moscow.

“We should stand up very firmly against the Russian aggression that’s taking place,” Cameron said before the Parliament on Wednesday.

The PM reminded that it’s the UK, which “led the way in Europe in making sure there were sanctions”imposed against Russia over its 'annexation' of Crimea in March and Moscow’s alleged involvement in the Ukrainian crisis.

“And what the combination of the lower oil price and the sanctions are showing that I think it isn’t possible for Russia to be part of the international financial system, but try and opt out of the rules-based international legal system,” Cameron said.

“We should keep up the pressure,” the head of the British government added, agreeing that “in this respect the interests of the United Kingdom and democracy do go together.”

The EU is expected to announce a new round of sanctions against Russia on Thursday, during the European Council’s meeting in Brussels. According to Reuters, the restrictive measures will forbid EU firms from investing in the Crimea and prohibit the trade of European oil and gas exploration technologies from the EU to the region.

READ MORE: Obama already signed new ‘Russia sanctions bill’ – State Department

Meanwhile US President Barack Obama has already signed a legislation authorizing new sanctions on Moscow, targeting weapons companies and investors in Russian high-tech oil projects. The sanctions, however, will not be effective immediately since Obama has been hesitant to introduce any new restriction without prior “synchronization” with European partners.

West behind falling ruble, oil prices - Russian spy chief

‘Russia Challenged by Four 

Global Mafia Cartels’

Sputnik News,

19 December, 2014

President Putin identified oil prices and sanctions as the external factors affecting the Russian economy. Yet, these are obviously the tools. Who is using them? Radio Sputnik discussed the issue with German political analyst Christoph R. Hörstel.

00:00 / 00:00

http://sputniknews.com/radio_burning_point/20141219/1016060718.html


Focusing on the state of the national economy during an annual press conference Thursday Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged that ‘we have failed to achieve many of the things that were planned and that needed to be done to diversify the economy over the past 20 years’. But, he still maintained that ‘the current situation was obviously provoked primarily by external factors’.

The external factors identified in the president’s address were falling oil prices and Western sanctions over Ukraine. Well, these are the instruments. How about those who are using these tools?

Says Christoph R. Hörstel, Managing Director of Hörstel Networks Government & Business Consulting:

In my viewpoint there are four or five multi-criminal global mafia structured corporate cartels. And four of them are now busying themselves against Russia. The main driving force is the most powerful cartel, and that is the financial mafia. So, what we have here is a huge speculation against the Ruble and, of course, a full participation against any kind of financing Russia might need. So, this leads to the issue of the idea of a bank being founded by the BRICS countries, by the members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and others, to set it up against the Western-dominated World Bank – a very wise and clever step.

Now we see that, for example, in Ukraine we have the energy mafia at work. That means there are huge fracking contracts Mr. Yanukovych must have tried to put a little bit of the billions he contracted with Shell and other companies for the fracking activities in Ukraine, into his own pocket.

And of course, these people are very-very much interested in stopping any flow of gas or/and oil from Russia to the Western countries, because they want to do the business themselves and they want to dry out the Russian economy.

These two most important factors are very much enhanced and helped, and supported in a concerted and organized way by the media cartels, which are running against your President, Mr. Putin, and Russia. And they are trying to undermine his presidency in Russia. The reason is very simple: Mr. Putin is resisting any effort of the Western countries and of their corporate mafia cartels to control Russia and control their raw materials – oil and gas.

Of course, the financial mafia, which is overstretched and has created a huge — it is completely incredible for the insiders how huge this already is — financial bubble. In order to let this bubble survive a little longer and keep the bonus payments running, and the wonderful multimillion, sometimes more than $100 million per year, for the top bankers running, they need more real background for this kind of financial bubble. And the control of the Russian oil and gas spheres would be just coming in handy.

So, they are trying their  best to in fact undermine the elected Government in Russia. And they do this very strongly and announced so since the reelection of President Putin. Very interesting! I heard that in Berlin this is the situation. And they said – should Mr. Putin make it back to the presidency, there will be trouble. That was a promise. And I knew that these people were dangerous. I immediately informed my Russian friends that this is the situation here. And this is exactly what has happened.

So, right now, what they are trying to do? For example, in Germany they are trying to push into line, to reshuffle completely, kick out the leaders of the two most important peace-oriented-Russia-friendly organizations – Petersburg dialog, founded by President Putin and our German Chancellor Schroeder, and the German-Russian Forum with the long and very good tradition of friendship, cooperation and also friendly criticism of Russia (which is sometimes necessary). And of course, we have the Russian criticism of Germany, which is very good and very helpful among good friends.

But what Mrs. Merkel obviously had in mind was something like criticizing to death. She wants to hack away, do Russia bashing, do Putin bashing and she wants to use these organizations for that. Of course, the leadership doesn’t want it, the members don’t want it and now she tries some kind of a coup, to just exchange the leadership through public pressure – quite a very terrible and undemocratic game. And that is just one example of how in each and every country doing business with Russia the leaders try, because they are under the command of all these corporate mafia cartels, to implement this anti-Russian policy. That is the game of the day.

So, do I get it right that you actually pointed to the financial mafia, energy mafia, media mafia…

Christoph R. Hörstel: And number four would be the arms industry. Because what we have here by creating the terror of Mr. Putin or the terror of Russia and how Russia is so aggressive, that they insist on salvaging the Crimean people from the aggression of the Kiev Nazis, how could Russia do this. So, of course, we need more arms. And this is what they are doing. And just today we got the news that the US conceded – yes, we are doing many more spy missions in the air against Russia, yes, we are bringing lots of materials – tanks, artillery, cruise missiles and so on to the Russian border.

So, they admittedly beef up the military sector. And who is earning? Well, as far as I understand, it is the arms industry earning. And they are in line, you know, these cartels sit at tables together, they concentrate on this. This can be read and verified in the official US army strategy Joint Vision 2020, where all these activities can be streamlined, including the media, including even NGOs. So, what Mrs. Merkel is doing in Germany is very much in line with this US army originated vision paper.

But to implement those policies, as far as I understand it, these four mafias need certain instruments. What are the instruments they are using?

Christoph R. Hörstel: All kinds of organizations with the very long-standing record of the implementation of policies. We just point out one thing – there has never been in the American history an administration like that of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Barack Obama, with such a strong presence of one global bank – Goldman Sachs. Never before! There has never been before such a strong presence of leading bankers in the leading positions of an administration. Both these cases. That is just one point.

But then, we have all these usual suspects – the Council on Foreign Relations (the CFR), Trilateral Commission – you name it. We have the think tanks, who are very much in the game – some more, some less. If they are more conservative, they are more hardline; if they are a bit more to the democratic field, they are not so hardline. Right now we face a very interesting situation, that Barack Obama is in fact not very happy about the further sanctions, but the Congress is doing that for him.

So, there is a whole interior bickering in the US going on about that, very much as in Germany, of course. Then Obama tries to use his influence on the Europeans, so that they take part of the burden and the blame for further sanctions. But in fact, he is being pushed. It is not him, as we understand, ruling America. It is these corporate cartels ruling America since its very existence.

We can read the American history, to make that clear, as the history of the political sector fighting off the power-greedy financial sector. And already in 1913, under the presidency of Mr. Wilson they failed and the federal bank was given into the private banking hands. That was the downfall of any chance of the political sector to ever regain control and influence over the politics in the US.

Do they have a lot of  supporters or agents, if you wish?

Christoph R. Hörstel: Good question, in both terms. Yes, they do have the supporters. They are parts of the business society and other parts, who are susceptible to this kind of influence. And yes, they have agents. These are the hundreds, more than 600 so-called NGOs, which is of course a lie in itself – these NGOs are all more or less fed with the Government money and many-many of them are indulging into anti-government activities. And they are even proud of it.
I've talked to some of them. They are so proud and they are so convinced that they are doing something good for democracy and some, I understand, are even too stupid to really know what they are really doing. So, they are blindly following the orders.

How we should deal with this situation?

Christoph R. Hörstel: In this very case with these agents going on, from the start I was a strong supporter of the Russian Government’s move against those NGOs in the ways they did it. That was completely accurate. It was on the point. It was measured, it was not overdrawn. There was a situation when I had some criticism that there were some computers taken in by prosecutors and things like that. And that came indiscriminately. So, there were some of the employees who were doing an honest job. I'm quite sure that Russia understands who these people are. And some were doing a dishonest job. And my advice at that time, unwarrantedly, was to take the computers of those guys who are dishonest.

So, this was not the case always. That was a sad story. It is minor detail, really nothing. The main line was 100% correct. It was overdue. Russia should have done that much-much earlier and it would have saved Russia a lot of trouble. And now we understand that we have demonstrations, being party financed from the outside. Of course, I understand. I'm an unhappy citizen of Germany, too. I criticize my Government, very strongly sometimes.

So, there is of course a justified unrest sometimes and often. We are not discussing this. We are discussing  foreign influence which in fact, in reality is the policy to undermine Russia, to undermine the elected Government. That is a completely different question. It is sometimes difficult to draw the line, but that we have those anti-Russian activities with the NGOs, with the foreign influence, with the foreign money inside Russia – that is 100% sure.

What these four corporate cartels want to do is they want to push Russia into obedience, and then exploit the values. They want to control it. If Russia is not obeying, if Russia is continuing to disobey, as it looks now under the present President, then these cartels will push for a limited war. We must understand that these cartels are also, at the same time, as they threaten Russia, they are threatening Europe, because they want to have taxpayers’ money for their zero-value derivatives and other fraud papers.

And unless those European governments comply (and you know that Mr. Draghi from the ECB wants to spend 1 billion Euros on these zero-value papers), unless the Europeans comply, there is another threat of a war. And these mafia cartels have prepared three areas where to fight this war. One is Ukraine, one is the ME with Iran, Iraq, Turkey and the last one is Israel and Palestine proper. So, these are the three places where that could be fought. And that means that we are in fact talking about a preparation of the world war, should these governments combined – European and Russian – not comply with those wishes of very greedy and multi-criminal people.

This is in fact the line we have to watch. That is going to happen, if Russia doesn’t comply, – there will be a war in Ukraine and they will try to draw Russia into a conflict it doesn’t want to have.

But that doesn’t actually mean that, if the European and Russian governments do not comply, they are bearing the responsibility for the beginning of the war.

Christoph R. Hörstel: Exactly! This is it. And, if you want, historically astonishing or interesting fact is that the Europeans and Russians are under the same threat of the same quartet. The sooner we understand that, the better our counterstrategy will be.