YouSaid · the spoken record

Jacob Shapiro

lines on the record: 78
first: 2022-03-04
most recent: 2022-03-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I can give you a more confident read, but right now I don't see Doom Loop. Right now I see speculative frenzy and fear dominating the market.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're not in a loop right now. We're still kind of on the way up. I said, I don't feel like I have enough data to be frank with you. I see scenarios where we can go really high and then get in the Doom loop. I can also see scenarios where things back away. I think the next two weeks are critical. So I don't think it's really possible to come up with an answer right now. I think what you really have to do is identify those variables that are most important to you and keep track of them as much as you possibly can and also keep your brain really, really nimble to how this situation might change because it could change on a dime. In two weeks, we could be talking about how Russia took over Kyiv and how badly their operation started at first, but they've asserted control and now we're in a cold war. Or we could be talking about how Russia still seems incapable of communicating on the ground and getting its logistical supply lines to catch up with its military objectives. So once we have a little bit more clarity about the trajectory of where the military...”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An investment in Russia is absolutely brilliant. I just think that if you're doing it right now, I just think there's a lot more of this war to come, to be frank and to be kind of, I don't know, dour about it. I don't think we're anywhere close to the end of this conflict. And if we're not close to the end of this conflict, I would be hesitant about you're basically just playing the lottery then. You're not actually making a decision there based on anything but pure luck because right now all we know for certain is that it's going to be a rough week or two for Ukraine and the images and videos we're going to get out of Ukraine are going to get worse.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For me, there's still, I mean, you said RSX, I believe it was at 612 or something on your chart. There's still room for it to go down. We're not even close to the end of this conflict yet. So it's not a moral issue for me. I think your timing's wrong. The Russians don't even have Kyiv yet. Like they're just beginning to really bomb these cities. The situation is going to get worse before it gets better. I can absolutely concoct scenarios where Russian stocks are good investments. Probably the one that would be most favorable would be the Palace coup scenario or even a grassroots kind of takedown of Putin and maybe Russia gets remade in some kind of friendlier version of itself. I mean, in that sort of scenario, if you bought now, I mean, you could, that's sort of what the Germans have been dreaming about for literally over a century. They want Russia to be integrated into a European economic framework that helps the Germans make their economy that much stronger by taking advantage of all those commodities and all that cheap labor that they think they can find out there. So there are scenarios where an”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, this is not investment advice, but if Ahmad Issa wants to do that, you have more balls than me, man. Go for it. I would not be able to pull the trigger on that trade no matter how nice the risk-reward looks to me.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think a big lesson of this is that not investing in oil is not the same thing as investing in green energy. You can't just not invest in oil and then not invest in not invest enough in sustainable renewables and then have an energy crisis and then be surprised when the price of oil is at 115 bucks. We got how quickly an hour goes by with you, Jacob? We got a question from Ahmad Issa who says Ahmad Issa is not content to just speculate in Russian stocks, the RSX, which is down, I don't know, 80% they're looking at spare bank. Do we buy the sanctions banks, example spare bank? Too risky, but the asymmetry is tempting. And I should just note I looked up at Sparebank a few months ago is at $20 US dollars at ADR American depository receipt, $20. And now it's at 52 cents. And I actually saw that trading was.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nicaragua is the big one, obviously, that has kind of flipped into authoritarian land as well. In its own backyard, the United States is having a lot of trouble, so let alone that it's going to go fool around in Eastern Europe for a conflict that is really more important to the Europeans than it is to the Americans. But yes, if the United States had been forward thinking about all this, then what it should have done was it should have made amends with Venezuela and invested a lot of money in renewables and sent a lot of money to the Europeans for renewables so that they weren't so dependent on Russia for energy. Because if you didn't have this energy dependency, that's the only thing sort of keeping Russia from the full weight of sanctions that we're talking about. So if you were a forward-thinking, either European or US foreign policymaker, you would have circled this 20 years ago and you would have had plenty of time to get away from the position that we're in right now.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm sure Saudi dude will now come on and say that we're completely black. I agree. I am biased. I don't like the inconsistency there kind of in U.S. foreign policy. But that's why that's actually why I gravitored towards geopolitics because you can leave all the ideology aside. I'm just trying to understand the behavior of states. Yes, if Biden, if the Biden administration was more forward thinking, and I actually was wrong about this, I actually thought they were going to treat Latin America and Cuba and Venezuela in particular a little differently. They haven't. They really haven't changed much from the Trump administration's approach to both of those countries, whether that's for domestic political reasons or just because he's been distracted. I don't know. But one of the things that the U.S. is going to have to do is get its own backyard in order. And when you look at what's happening, you know, places like El Salvador, places like Honduras in Mexico even, like the United States is losing.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All information. I'll just add you, Hotic. I mean, talk about supporting democracies like Saudi Arabia is a monarchy. And the phrase Saudi is literally, it's the name of a family. That's like soprano, New Jersey, you know, Saudi Arabia. Anyway, go ahead.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Out there. And the flip side of your question is there are plenty of US allies that are also guilty of all sorts of terrible things. Saudi Arabia is the shining example. We're going to talk about countries that are guilty of human rights abuses or that have done things that have not been in the U.S. interest. They're kind of top of the one on my list. But what do they have and what have they always had? A bunch of oil. So they always get a pass from the United States and have since Franklin Delana Roosevelt in the 1940s and when that relationship came strong. That was a little bit hot taking in Ramley. But all I'm trying to say, I'll just add to you”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's a Yeah, well, so I mean, I'm glad we already made him happy, but I'll kind of go a step further, which is there are all kinds of anachronisms in American foreign policy that don't make any sense. You went to Venezuela, which is one of the top ones. Cuba is the biggest one. The United States has been treating Cuba the way that it has for, I mean, I guess it's because of domestic politics and because of how important Florida is and because the Cuban vote in Florida is very anti-the regime there and nobody wants to piss off Florida if we're getting very specific. But US foreign policy towards Cuba hasn't made sense for decades. And Cuba actually has some of the commodities that we're talking about that Russia doesn't. It could be kind of a very good place. I think nickel is the place that Cuba has a surprisingly high amount of reserves that could be useful in a situation like this. They do Venezuela, yes. Venezuelan oil. If you had Venezuelan oil on the market and a functioning Venezuelan economy, we're not talking about this because we're actually probably talking about $20 barrel of oil because there's too much oil.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The head of state there certainly done some bad things to its own people. However, Venezuela has not invaded Ukraine. Venezuela has not invaded a neighbor. We have quite stringent, very stringent sanctions on Venezuelan oil, which is the greatest, most ample oil reserves in the world. So what about take sanctions off Venezuela and Venezuela sends oil to Europe? And then that will give Europe a surplus that it can impose sanctions on energy to Russia. What about that?”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's really happening, and what's really happening is you have Europe which would love to cut Russia off tomorrow and can't because you can't cut off your two legs from underneath you just because you have a feeling about that Russia did something you don't like. Like that's not normally how politics works.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I would challenge people who want full sanctions on energy the same way I would challenge people who want Europe or the United States to enforce a no-fly zone or to actually fight on behalf of Ukrainians. That's a perfectly justifiable position, but just realize what that means. If you're full energy sanctions, that means you're taking away the source of almost half of Europe's energy production. How are you going to make up for that? I never hear that side of the argument from the people who want energy sanctions. Ditto that for the folks who are kind of shouting about no-fly zones and wanting to fight the Russians on the ground in Ukraine, like, okay, like what happens when that escalates into a World War III type scenario? Is that really what you're willing to go for? So again, that's why I try and stay away from the hot take business to my own detriment, people who have hot takes get more. No, they do. They get more clicks and they get more likes. They get more notice. Like that's not what I'm particularly interested in. I'm more interested.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bad in terms of the flow of commodities. Of course, if you're someone who's calling for sanctions on energy, it's bad because you do want the flow to stop. You just think that the flow of energy, it's just so critical to Europe that it's really not on the table.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“didn't do this and if that sounds crazy to people keep in mind we've mentioned the Iran nuclear deal a couple times here Russia's part of those those negotiations they're going great and like you said like Russian Ukraine are still trading Russian oil and natural gas is still in the market if you're Pakistan you just got a bunch of cheap Russian wheat you know all these things are still happening so that's why I say like don't you have to read everything out there but you don't have to believe everything you read at the same time and there is a narrative in European and Western and American media some of which is truth some of which is not truth some of which is anger some of which is fear you kind of have to parse through all that and look at where things are actually going right now and I won't tell you things are good but things are not quite as bad as everybody I think is making them out to be yet”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think I've actually alluded to this to you before. One of the reasons strategic analysts like me don't like war is because we become less relevant during wars because things don't always go according to plan. So forget about sabotage. What if one errant missile falls on the wrong pipeline at the wrong time and cuts things off? You think the Europeans are going to believe that it was just an accident, even if maybe it was an accident and they didn't mean to, it kind of sets things off. War is really, really unpredictable in addition to being really hard. So all of those things are on the table. That could happen tomorrow and all of the things that we're talking about could happen, not because anybody had any political plan to do so, but because it was just an accident, because that's what happens when people are firing missiles at each other in a kinetic environment. So yeah, it's all possible. But in that particular case, if something like that happened, I would assume that the Russians would actually try and cooperate with people and make it clear that, hey,”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Already, and then you throw in this war, and every war that nobody was expecting, including myself, and you get a lot of fear and you get a lot of speculation just like you said. So I don't see anything right now that makes me think that the fundamentals are off. And that's why I'm not so scared. Like this all sort of to me is within the bounds of there's a war, people are afraid, people are trying to figure out what's going to happen next and positioning themselves accordingly. That changes if you get Iran level sanctions against Russian oil because Russia will still export oil abroad as Iran does, but it will be very difficult for them to sell all of it and certainly not at the price that they want to sell it. But yeah, I don't, we're not in a land yet where the fundamentals are any worse than they were necessarily before this conflict started. We're talking about politics and ideology and fear, all of which are very real, but which you're only going to get oil at $200, $300 a barrel if that comes with some kind of”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jack, if the fundamentals of investing were always right, I would own a little island and be drinking little drinks with little umbrellas in them and not here talking to you on this phone call. So much of investing is psychological. So I think when you're looking at what's going on, and by the way, markets are tight. Like there are a lot of reserves out there, but demand was already exceeding supply by about a million barrels per day at the beginning of the year. So you had a tight market.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, for shoals to talk about how they're going to throw 100 billion euros that the German military and they'll have two LNG terminals in a couple years. And they'll send them some anti-tank missiles. Like, that seems to me to be the extent to which Europe is willing to actually help Ukraine. Now, the extent to which Europe is going to try as quickly as possible to wean itself off of Russian energy, like that raises the question of whether Russia, when Russia sees that that leverage is not going to be leverage anymore, maybe then that's when they kind of pull that cord in order to go back and hurt Europe from that fundamental basis. But I just don't see, like from a reality, it's just like, I don't know how Europe functions if suddenly all the lights go out. And if you really do stop all of Russia's oil and all of Russia's natural gas from coming into the block, that's kind of what we're talking about. We're talking about having to ration energy supplies for.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm going to stick to my guns here and just say that if Europe decides that it wants to shut off natural gas from Russia tomorrow, okay, then I just don't know how they're going to make up for the shortfall. Like even if you rerouted LNG and even if you used a lot more coal and even if you rationed energy production by”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first of all, Lukashenko, what a crazy guy. And I saw the map that he purportedly showed and that Moldova was on the invasion plan or whatever. Maybe it was. I don't know. I mean, maybe if they had gotten to Kiev in two days, maybe they would have continued to roll into Moldova. I'm not 100% convinced of that. But like I said, I would be worried if I was Moldova. Everything that's happening in Ukraine should kind of scare me there. Yes, there's a difference between sort of full-on nuclear war and between energy sanctions.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Objectively speaking, like nobody wanted to die for the Ukrainians and nobody's gonna lose all of their energy security, I think, because Russia is in Ukraine. Poland's different. That's a military alliance, and there have been commitments made. And if you don't draw the line there, things are kind of different. I think Putin probably knows that too. That's why any country in Eastern Europe, and they're not a whole lot of them, I mean, Moldova should be very concerned about its future right now. countries that are not in NATO in Eastern Europe. Those are kind of ripe for the pick and for Russia. The flip side of that, of course, is I think that's the worst, again, I think this is a miscalculation for Putin. Okay, so you get an insurgency in Ukraine in a country you're not going to be able to control. Was that really worth it?”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But no, I don't see them going to the energy sanctions. You said Poland, though. As soon as we get to a NATO country, we're not talking about energy sanctions. We're talking about World War III. Because if you violate, and I mean, maybe I'm wrong and maybe I'm too much faith in U.S. security promises. I don't know. But everything that I know about geopolitics tells me that if Russia went after any NATO member, then it's gloves off. And it's not just energy sanctions, it's US military forces, it's no-fly zones. It's the whole nine yards. So I think that's one of the reasons that the, you know, if you really wanted to deter Russia, if you were the West and you really cared about Ukraine, they would have been in NATO already. And they're not in NATO because people care enough to make Twitter comments and Instagram posts about them, but not enough to die for them. And I'm not judging one way or another. I'm just saying sort of a”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, first of all, Russia's already guilty of war crimes. The United States is guilty of war crimes in Iraq with that opinion in $2.75. You can go to any Starbucks and get a cup of coffee. That's about what it's worth. So I'm very cynical about this. People are making a big rhetorical show of support for Ukraine. And I think people actually do really believe it. They want to support Ukraine. I don't think that however tough it gets inside Ukraine, that those energy sanctions are going to be forthcoming. Like I said, I don't see Europe committing energy suicide for Ukraine. They've opened up their borders to Ukrainian refugees. They'll obviously probably fund and arm the insurgency. I'm sure they'll try and make life as miserable as they possibly can for Russia and start all these. I hope they start a TV show of all the yachts that they're seizing. I think that would be sort of epic Hollywood entertainment sort of stuff.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that if you have real political will and you have real money behind reducing that dependence on Russia, that can happen quicker than you think. Because if you combine some LNG and some renewable spending and you get some more shale producers pumping in the US, I mean, you could start to cobble that together, not in weeks, but are we talking quarters? Are we talking maybe a year or two? Like maybe you can get to the place where you're less dependent and then you can be like Canada and sanction Russian energy because you don't need them anymore, right? But I don't with the level of energy dependence Europe still has on Russia and with the lack of alternatives in the short term by which I mean sort of the three to nine month period to wean themselves off of it I don't see those types of energy sanctions for anything less than something like tactical nuclear strikes or something where that'll be the least of our problems if we get there”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't see it happening. I don't see Europe committing energy suicide over Ukraine. I absolutely believe that they will move as quickly as possible and spend as much money as possible to reduce their dependence on Russia over time. I could see them having maybe they put them trying to have their imports of Russian energy, but I think that's all going to be stuff that's going to happen internally in the EU. If they go much further here, like I said, I can't imagine that any political leader, no matter what the sort of populist view is going to be, I can't really imagine any political leader signing up for $300 barrel of oil or tripling of natural gas prices if they don't absolutely have to. I think the bigger issue here is not going to be what's going to happen in the course of weeks because I don't see any European leader being able to do that and remain in power. It's going to be how quickly can they transition away from Russia.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About the oligarchs, but I actually have something more interesting if Russia takes over Kyiv, the Zelensky government is gone, whether Zelensky is assassinated or something horrible like that. What do you think the odds are of sanctions on Russian energy? Real sanctions, no loopholes, no, the U.S. Treasury provides diagrams telling Russian banks how they can circumvent their own sanctions, like real, not a drop of Russian gas in Berlin.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I think the most likely scenario is still that Russia will take Kiev. I'm scared for Zelensky. I would rather him not have, I don't want anyone to have to become a martyr. I think he's positioned himself as somebody who is obviously a thorn in Russia's side. And I could see that kind of scenario unfolding for him. Not saying that's what's going to happen, but I think you can't help but worry for him in that sort of situation. But no, I think that Russia's firepower and its overwhelming superiority in numbers is eventually going to assert itself and that they will take Kyiv. So I think in the short term, probably Putin will get what he wants. In the long term, I still think this is a terrible.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'll try to answer all parts of that. And if I miss any, please come back at me and hit me at what I missed. Grain of salt, and I've been eating plenty of my own humble pie the last week. I didn't think Russia was going to invade in the first place. So I feel a little weird saying, okay, and now I'm going to tell you exactly what's going to happen. I have to, like the only person who hasn't fallen off a horse is one who hasn't ridden a horse, as we say back on the farm. So you got to get back on and try again, right? And at least be honest about where your analysis failed. And I think I have been.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was going to be what Russia's geopolitics looked like, no matter whether it was Putin in power, no matter whether the United States did or didn't let people into NATO. That was what it was going to look like. Maybe it changes the tactics and things like that, but it wouldn't have changed Russia's imperatives, not in the slightest.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I don't think it would have made any difference. Maybe there would have been less aggression because many of these Eastern European countries wouldn't have joined the EU and then Russia wouldn't have felt threatened. But what I can say is that whether the United States did that or not, as soon as Russia got over the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was going to start pushing out into Eastern Europe because that's what it's always done with its foreign policy. Russia needs strategic depth. And whether that's through satellite states or political incentives or through tanks rolling through Kyiv, it can do the tactics can change, but Russia's geopolitical imperatives, they've been the same for half a millennium, which is push out to the Carpathian Mountains, keep pushing out as far as you can, get strategic depth so that those threats that emanate from the West, whether they're NATO, the United States, Hitler, Napoleon, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, whoever they are, make it so they have to go over a lot of territory before they can get to Moscow to make things hard.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If it's Russia's fault. I think the thing that is good about Mirzheimer and that he's very good at is explaining to you why Russia is doing what it's doing and why the US is doing what it's doing. And we can leave the false stuff to sort of armchair philosophers who want to decide what's right and wrong for the world because that's above my page.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's an academic, so I think that he should have the right to say or study anything that he wants. And I don't think anybody who is going after him for speaking his opinion on this, I want him to be able to say whatever he wants because he's brilliant. And whether he's right or wrong, he's always been somebody who kind of says things that are extremely interesting. I would obviously, and I haven't seen the exact quote with him, but I've seen it floating around. I'm not particularly interested in whose fault this is. I'm sure there's fault on both sides. I don't think it would be fair to say that it is in any way the United States' fault that Russia is gone into Ukraine. It takes both of those powers not talking to each other, not thinking of each other's interests, not prioritizing each other to get to a situation like we're in. But it's also at a certain point like, okay, so what if we decide that it is the United States' fault? What does that do for anyone? What does it do if?”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Huntington was a clash of civilizations. If you want to look him up, he was also wrong about a lot of different things. But so Mirchheimer is a really, really smart guy. I've actually met him once or twice. He probably doesn't remember me at all, but I've seen him speak. He's a very, very compelling figure. His books are great. He's really the, I wouldn't say the founder, he's sort of the godfather of the realist school of politics, which has a lot of overlap with geopolitics. Realism is about the difference between realism and geopolitics is that geopolitics is more just descriptive and it's more about trying to describe what is and what will be, whereas realism tries to say, okay, now that you've done all that, I want to say this is what you should do in order to get those goals. And it tries to abstract reality out of that. It says that states have interests and that all of foreign policy should be just about achieving your interest, not about things like democracy or xenophobia or anything like that. It's just, okay. Like my interest is to get to the Carpathians. I want to get to the Carpathians.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Strategic miscalculation, but I'm not one who is going to sit here and tell you that everything is one person's fault or not one's person's fault. And I'm certainly not going to tell you that U.S. foreign policy here has been particularly good or that the Europeans have been particularly good. Part of the reason this is here is that Putin didn't take Europe seriously because he thought the Germans were just going to look the other way and he had plenty of reason to think the Germans were going to look the other way. He didn't think he was going to sort of have any costs there. Meersheimer For those who don't know who John Mearsheimer is. I'm forgetting what's his book, Great Power Politics. I'm now forgetting the title of the book that made him famous. Anyway, he's one of the most famous U.S. foreign policy experts in the academic community. I already mentioned Francis Fukuyama, Mirzheimer, and then Samuel Huntington is probably the big three of kind of the 80s, 90s, early 2000s is when they made their name.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Into Eastern Europe than it was going to. Like, sure, I get it, but it's all pretty much immaterial to me because I'm pretty sure that Russia would have found a way to keep pushing out because that's what it's always done. And the U.S. was going to push out there as well too. All of these ideologies and these political statements that people use to paper over things. They're interesting. They tell you things about political leaders' motivations and things like that. But one of the things about geopolitics, which is my discipline, is to get away from all that and look at the fundamentals, which is to say exactly what you're saying. Like the reason Russia is in Ukraine is because it feels threatened from the West in Europe and that the Carpathian Mountains at the end of the Ukrainian border is a much more defensible position than its current position. Now, I thought that the best way for Russia to secure that would have been using its political leverage because it had everybody dancing to their tune already before they did this invasion. For some reason, they felt like they had to go in. And I think that was.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great. I'm shocked, but pleased that Mersheimer is coming up. We'll get to him kind of in a second. Look, Party on Dude, you will not find in me someone who is going to tell you that U.S. statesmanship or foreign policy for the last 30 years has been anything other than an unmitigated disaster. And we can go down Iraq, Afghanistan, the trade war. You start it. Both sides of the aisle, short-sighted thinking, nobody thinking strategically. I mean, I have all sorts of bad things I could say about U.S. foreign policy. And by the way, I did say earlier on in the show, I talked about how Russia's strategic history and its history of invasion from the West, I absolutely get why Russian strategic decision makers are afraid and weren't happy about NATO pushing out and weren't happy that they felt like the US was reneging on whatever, whether it was promised or not.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On China. And the more that Russia is really going to have to think of itself as a gas station for India and for China and align itself there and it's going to have all sorts of problems geopolitically, I think, there in the long term. So in that sense, in a roundabout way, that chart tells you that too.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, it looks like. I think this is a, in some ways, it's a beautiful piece of empirical data that tells you just how much Western investors are not happy with what Russia is doing and doesn't want to be there at all. I mean, for the first time in my, well, I don't want to say in my career, but for the first time in five or ten years, I'm hearing investors say things like, I don't care if the valuation looks good. I don't want to be in Russian stocks right now. And that's something I'm hearing kind of more and more, which is shocking. The whole point of investing is to make money, not to feel good about what you're doing or to feel bad about what you're doing, et cetera. So I think there is a real sea change here. And in this, you know, and another thing to say about this chart, I think, is that as Russia kind of turns away from the West and has that ideological clash with the West, it's going to have to move east. I think the thing we haven't said today at all is that the more that Russia finds itself isolated from Europe and the United States, the more it becomes dependent.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me on them. Please do let me know and don't be shy. I actually know I'm doing a good job when I get hate mail from both sides of a political issue. That's always what I'm going for. In terms of RSX in general, I mean, at CI actually, we had a small position in RSX early on when I still thought the chances of a resolution was going to be fairly high. I kind of liked the risk reward then. We got rid of that very, very quickly before this massive dip that you're showing on your screen here because things started to change, which again, that goes to you. You have to learn to change your mind very, very quickly. You can have the perfect model all you want. But when reality starts telling you something different, it's important to get out. I think part of what you're seeing on this chart is people didn't get out or weren't able to change their minds or couldn't understand what's going wrong. But this, I mean, whether it's the ruble chart or it's this chart, this is what fear looks like. This is what people saying, I don't want to be involved in this market.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, before I answer that question just about the objectivity thing, I just also just want to say I try to be as objective as possible. Nobody is objective. It's something to aspire to. It's not something that you will ever reach. It's a Sisyphine task. All I can say is I promise to tell you when I'm wrong and I promise to tell you what my biases are and to be open about what my biases are. Absolutely my bias is against the Russians here. If we want to have a conversation about like what I think the moral implications of all this are you and I can crack open a beer here and maybe we can talk about it that but that's not why people pay me and that's not why people normally want to talk to me like they talk to me because I try and detach myself from those considerations and leave that for conversations with my friends at happy hour not for when we're trying to understand what's going on why it's going on so I'm sure there are biases embedded in what I'm saying I'm actually grateful to people like Party on Dudes when they when they're able to catch”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like a guy who just wanted to have foreign investment in free trade and make bring Russia into the 21st century economy, things like that. But yes, the WTO is really just an organization that if you join, it means you're signing on to the idea that free trade is good. So you're not allowed to unfairly protect your own domestic industries or you're not allowed to do things for a political reason that would obstruct trade.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it did for 30 years, and then history came back, didn't it? And some people will tell you that the moment the WTO went off the rails was when it let China in because China obviously did a lot of things with its economy that didn't completely jive with what the WTO wanted it to do and it was supporting a lot of industries that should have failed and it didn't, you know, once you let kind of that one mistake in, it compounded throughout the system. I don't know about that. I think there was also speaks to this idea in the West that if you do have free trade and you welcome someone into the WTO, that they will eventually become a liberal democracy. That was obviously wrong about China. I think, by the way, it's wrong about Russia too. I think a lot of people thought that if you integrate Russia into the global economy, that suddenly Russia's not going to be as scary as it was in the past. And Putin, if you go back and look at old quotes from Putin 10, 15 years ago, he used to talk like that. He used to talk.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, this all goes, it all arises out of the post World War II order that the US helped lead. It goes from GATT to WTO. I mean, the EU is part of this whole thing as well. But the whole idea for the US was to have free trade. The Cold War was about sort of the US liberalized trading system versus the Soviet communist system, right? That was where they were squaring off. And the WTO was founded in 1995. In some ways, it's the declaration of victory for the United States in the Cold War because the United States gets to say, okay, the Soviet Union collapsed and now, as Francis Fukiyama said, the end of history is here and everybody's going to want to be a liberal democracy and everybody's going to have free trade. And this is going to be great. And that's exactly what happened, Jake.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've already been on a trajectory where countries are ignoring the WTO. And when you're in a situation where national security issues like this are on the table, people are going to ignore the WTO even more. That's part of what Russia wants. Russia wants to undermine all of these international institutions, which it views as undergirding U.S. supremacy and primacy in the world. One of the reasons Russia and China get along right now, even though they're historical competitors, is because they both agree none of these rules were written for us. We want to rewrite these rules or at minimum we want to have our own rules and our own sphere of influence, and you can't come and interfere in our sphere of influence. And the whole reason we're here talking about Ukraine is because Russia thinks that Ukraine is in its sphere of influence and nobody else agrees with them. So as you can tell, I'm not very optimistic about the long-term prospects for what have been very important multilateral.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was dead in the water right now, anyway. It still exists. I'm sure it's still going to exist for a long time. But when you kind of look around at the global economy, even before this war, there was a whole lot of protectionism sprouting up all over the place. And in some ways, the US started this. The US-China trade war was a big opening salvo, I think, and an attack against the WTO and saying the WTO had not really done what that US government wanted it to do. So I think kind of what you're seeing going forward here is, and this is what I was alluding to with the remaking of trade so quickly, you're seeing the emergence of these distinct spheres of geopolitical influence. And some of them are not going to interact with each other. And just because the WTO tells Russia that they can't have a tariff on something or they can't have a protectionist trade measure or tells the US that it can't do this or that sanction, people are just going to ignore the WTO in those situations. So I'm not saying the WTO is going to collapse overnight. I'm just saying that.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Take the easier one first, which is the ICC at the International Criminal Court. In the words of Dave Chappelle as Black President Bush, what are you going to do? Sanction me with your army? Is the ICC going to sanction Russia with its army? Is it going to go in and arrest Vladimir Putin for war crimes? No. There's a reason that global institutions like the ICC have really only ever prosecuted African dictators. I guess you can throw in some of what happened in Serbia at the time, although in the late 90s, although I don't think that was the ICC. I think that was another international body. But I don't put a whole lot of stock in those types of international law institutions. They've never been particularly strong, and they're obviously not going to stop Russia from doing anything. The WTO question is more interesting. And I was actually just talking with a client this morning about this. The sort of spicy hot take answer to you would be that I'm pretty sure the WTO.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Narrative. Maybe it does put pressure on leaders to do that. But the flip side of that is if you're calling for those types of sanctions, like you said, get ready for $200 barrel oil. You can't blink when it goes $200, $300. You can't blink when natural gas prices are going to triple on you right then and there. That's the sort of trade-off we're talking about if that's where you want to go with sanctions.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'm sorry, and I think I misspoke. It's the Islamic, it's the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. So the IRGC has been designated by the US as a terrorist group. It's on the, I believe. And I think one of the things that's actually on the table in the negotiations in Vienna around the Iran nuclear deal is taking the IRGC off of a list like that. I'm just using that as an example, though, to say like if you really want to go, you get creative with these things. Can you call certain parts of Russia? Can you call them terrorist groups? Can you craft new laws that would make some of these institutions even more of a pariah? There are absolutely things you can do. But if you escalate any more than you are right now, if you're the US or Europe, you're starting to risk energy supply and energy security. And as far as I can tell, that's still not something anybody's really going to stomach. I have a hard time believing that government leaders are going to do that just because things get worse in Ukraine. But the longer this goes on and the more grisly the reporting gets out of Ukraine and the more effective Ukraine is at presenting that.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT