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

“Could buy anything from Russia or pay Russia in anything, you would want to make them a pariah state. And by the way, they would find ways around that. And then you would have to impose new sanctions immediately as soon as they found a loophole. It's kind of like a game of whack-a-mole. There's not one thing you're going to do and it's going to stop everything. But if your decision is you want to cripple Russia and make sure nobody can pay them, things like no company may import Russian energy or else they will feel US sanctions. One of the things that the US does with Iran is that it describes the Iranian revolutionary guard corps as a terrorist group. And they own something like 40-50% of the Iranian economy when you actually start to look at it. So by putting them on the terrorist designation list, they can do all sorts of things to Iran.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I think when we spoke a week ago, I sort of said the initial sanctions were at a six. And if you're thinking on a sliding scale, make sort of perfect free trade, no sanctions as you're zero. And U.S. sanctions against Iran or North Korea would kind of be your 10. I think one of the difficulties that the United States and Europe and their partners are having is that there's not really a whole lot left on the table they can do before they get to energy sanctions. And they really don't want to do energy sanctions because of how dependent Europe is. That would make things a lot worse, I think. The US in particular is still operating in this framework that President Biden articulated, which is maximum amount of pain on Russia with a minimum amount of pain on the US and its allies. So if you wanted to get really serious, you wouldn't just have seven banks with SWIFT. It would be all Russian banks. And you would, you know, be doing everything you possibly could to make sure that nobody”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“German banks, Austrian banks, they're also all getting out of Russia as well. So I've talked for a long time about a multipolar world. It's literally happening right before our eyes. There are very few companies in Europe and in the United States that I think are willing, at least right now, to tolerate the kind of risk. I will say right before we got on the show, I saw McKinsey was saying they're going to stick around in Russia. So congrats to McKinsey for that decision.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The one that most surprised me was ExxonMobil, which did not have a particularly large operation in Russia, but was in the Far East. And I mean, Rex Tillerson was kind of famously in 2014 when the Ukrainian revolution started was very clear, oh, Exxon does this, we're neutral, we're a company, we're here to make money. We've withstood the test of time and we want to be here. Exxon started pulling out its employees. I think it was two days ago that Bloomberger Reuters was reporting that. There have been several other companies as well. But in general, I think that that's the one that jumps most to mind. If you've got ExxonMobil is throwing in the towel, that gives you a good sense of just how much US companies and European companies are writing it off. The second one is not a company. It's, I mean, Germany in particular, just at the foreign policy level. So obviously is making a U-turn that a lot of these German companies”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of an open relationship with Russia. So I would also say caution folks to understand that in Europe and in US in particular there's a lot of suspicion about Russia and I think that's driving some of these companies isolating themselves from Russia and driving even more of that economic pain. But not every country in the world is like that. And a lot of these countries that rely on Russia for some of these commodities and cannot easily replace them themselves. For them, they're thinking pragmatically and about an opportunity. And that's one of the amazing things about what's happening right now. Sometimes change happens gradually over a long period of time and sometimes change happens all at once. And we'll probably be dissecting the massive changes in global trade flows that are happening just in the last week or two for months. I'm sure it will fill many dissertations for graduate students down the road to understand how much has changed in the last few weeks and will change in the next few weeks as a result of all these political coalitions.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's honestly hard to understand because we're very, very early on into the sanctions regime and there are not easy answers to this. I don't think the commercial sanctions against Russia are really what is biting. What's been biting Russia to your point are these financial sanctions. The fact that the rubles value has basically been cut in half, the fact that a lot of especially European and American companies are just afraid of doing business with Russian companies right now. They're expecting sanctions on the level of the Iran sanctions that the US has passed against Iran and that have been in place for a long time. So I think part of though, and one of the things that is not being reported in Western press is that that's largely a Western slash European phenomenon. And that makes a lot of sense. I think the Europeans and the Germans in particular feel betrayed by Putin and everything that he's done. I think they thought that they had something of a pragmatic understanding here. But when you start looking”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And to what degree is the disruption in commodity markets not due to the sanctions themselves, but the impact of a literal war, right? So much of the increase in the price of war, the price of wheat, excuse me, not war, the reason that the ships can't get there is not because of sanctions. It's because of it's in the middle of a war zone. So shipping companies are not sending their ships there.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Three to four weeks down the road, that fear starts, I think, to turn into really serious fundamental problems that cannot be easily fixed by Saudi pumping more oil, for example, or from rerouting some LNG supplies from one to the other. If you're Egypt or if you're Turkey and you're importing 20% of your wheat from Russia, or if you're China and you take in 50% of Ukraine's corn exports and you're trying to rebuild your corn herd, you're already making contingency plans. The Chinese today bought a bunch of US corn and a bunch of US soybeans because they're worried about global kind of agricultural access. And I mean, it's a good, I don't want to say good. But if you're a Canadian farmer, a U.S. farmer, an Australian farmer, an Argentinian farmer, all of this is probably good news for your bottom line going forward.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Russia would have to show some serious success in its military objectives. We'd have to see more commercial shipping going in and out of the Black Sea. You could also see things repaired if these Russian-Ukrainian negotiations go anywhere. Maybe that could be a valve for releasing some of that pressure. But those are the two scenarios. Either Russia has able to accelerate its military campaign in Ukraine or Russia sort of has stared at the abyss and decides to walk things back a little bit. The worst thing, I think, for this situation would be what I think is most likely at this point, which is a slow, protracted, kind of grindin it out for a couple weeks as the Russians try and push forward and as the Ukrainians try to resist. I think that is kind of the worst case scenario for that. Again, though, like I think in those charts that you showed, that is still largely fear. But we get.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just to walk viewers through what you're saying, two of Russia's largest commodity exports are oil, natural gas, and then wheat. Oil and natural gas, you know, they're liquid, they can be flowed through a pipeline, they can be flowed over land, whereas wheat, it's really uneconomic to transport it by truck. So it has to go by ship. And that would have to be the Black Sea. And as viewers can see here, Russia has expanded its control of southern Ukraine, not just into Crimea. It hasn't quite made it to Odessa as well. And it's made an eastern land bridge with the Donbass. So a lot of port cities, Odessa, notwithstanding, are under Russian control. Therefore, the wheat from Ukraine cannot flow. And then we go to this next chart, which is the price of wheat, which has nearly doubled in the matter of only a few days.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Import new supplies. And meanwhile, you've got all this wheat and corn and barley that is literally just stuck in the Black Sea and is not getting out. Now there are reserves, there are other places to pick things up. But if this goes on for another month or two, then we're actually talking about fundamental supply and demand imbalance, especially if Ukrainian farmers in particular are not able to go sow their crops for the sort of for the spring planting season. So that's why I take the wheat situation a little bit more seriously in large part because I'm worried about the mismatch between supply and demand and I'm worried about the news that I'm seeing out of the Black Sea because this again goes to so many confusing things in terms of Russia's execution of this military operation. I don't know why they're letting commercial ships be fired on in the Black Sea. That cuts against everything you want the world to know about you if you're Russia. You want that commerce to keep going probably, especially if you don't want world opinion to turn against you. So that's why I'm a little more concerned about wheat. But oil, I mean, you know, it's we're”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wheat is a little different because what's happening with wheat is, and I think I've said the statistic on your show before, 90% of Russia's agricultural exports go out through the Black Sea. And Ukraine and Russia together account for 90% of the world's 29% of the world's wheat. They're also a major exporter of things like corn, barley, sunflower oil. We can talk about all those others. And what's happening right now, though, with the Black Sea is that Ukrainian commercial ports are closed. A lot of Russian ports are not working. Shipping is very hard to come by. Some ships are encountering mines or are being stopped or even being fired at or catching crossfire. It's not to say that all shipping has completely halted, but it's much lower than it was and folks aren't willing necessarily to go and charter new ships and things like that. So you've got countries like Egypt, like Pakistan, like South Korea, like China that are looking around trying to...”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wanted to not produce as much as they said they were going to or because they wanted to produce more because they wanted a bigger share of price. What's been happening with OPEC in the last couple months is you've had some countries that have just not been able to meet their production quotas. Nigeria is the first one that pops up in my head. I can't remember a few of the others. But because of that, you've had a situation where supply is simply not”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so two very different commodities. Let's start with oil. And oil also has the Iran nuclear deal, which is another big geopolitical issue floating around in the background as well. And that deal seems to be imminent. We're hearing a lot of good things out of Iran. You had Iran's oil minister actually saying that he thought really if he said this today or yesterday where he was saying that he thought Iran could have maximum production, which would be another roughly two million barrels of oil per day on the market, within a month or two of signing the Iran nuclear deal. I wouldn't trust what an Iranian oil minister said. He's obviously trying to present a picture there to increase Iranian leverage. But, you know, I think we're talking about months for Iran to come on the market. And anyway, I think that would go a long way towards resolving some of the market's panic. In general, though, we were already in a situation where overall demand was exceeding supply by about a million barrels per day. And that was largely because OPEC in the past, OPEC has always cheated in that different nations.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or not because if you and I are still here talking in a week or two, and this is still the situation, then I'm wrong about kind of what's happening next.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Want to say I'd be surprised if you and I are still having this conversation in two weeks and there are still convoys outside of Kyiv and the Ukrainians are still counterattacking and Zelensky is still in the streets making Instagram or Facebook videos and things like that, then we have to start talking about what are the odds that Russian President Vladimir Putin remains in power. As long as the Russian strategy is to keep going here, I really think they're going to have to make some serious progress and some serious headway here in a span of one to two weeks because if it goes on much longer than that, the combination of the financial consequences for the Russian economy, the political consequences for Putin, the boost in morale for the Ukrainian defenders, all of those things are going to work against Russia in the long term. So I would expect that some of these bombings and some of these horrible videos we're starting to see out of Ukrainian cities is the beginning of that Russian offensive. But like I said, we'll know very soon whether it is.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and we should be sure to. I'm not sure exactly who this was on Twitter, but we should make sure to have a link in whatever comes up afterwards. So, I mean, this is just a really good map showing you the actual vectors of advance. And you can see that, I mean, Russia is making progress. It's not like they've just been stalled at the border. They're getting there, and their forces are making progress. And once you can kind of, you know, you can see the pincer there starting to reach some of its aims. But I think the answer to your question is that now that Russia has regrouped, now that it seems to have shown that its resolve is still strong to keep going forward,”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even jam their communication. So, even on these basic levels, Russia isn't executing well on military strategy. All that said, I believe it was Stalin who said that quantity has a quality all of its own. I mean, the story of the Russian army has always been that they will outlast you and they've got more of them and they've got more firepower and they are more determined than you will be. And that's maybe the key factor here. It's very hard for someone, for any of us here to say, okay, how much of the drop in Russian morale is a result of a bad plan? How much of that is a result of they don't want to be fighting Ukrainians because they feel like they're their kin, how much of that is just the Ukrainians talking it up? Like we have no way really to know that. We just have the results in front of us, which is that the Russian soldiers are not making much headway, but they're there. They're coiling. They're striking eventually you would think that the odds and the overwhelming odds because of”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The thing that has been, I don't want to say most shocking, so many things have been the most shocking thing, but one surprising thing to me has been, if you look back at the 2008 conflict between Russia and Georgia, that conflict was much shorter, obviously, and Russia didn't attack Georgia in the way that it's attacking sort of the main centers of Ukraine. But Russia's performance in that war wasn't actually very good. And it wasn't very good because they had a lot of time, excuse me, they had a lot of difficulty coordinating between especially their air assets, their artillery, their land forces. That coordination just didn't happen very well. And over the past 14 years, Russia would be able to correct that. And they're not. Some of the reports that we're seeing are that, you know, Russian soldiers are using regular old communications. They're on WhatsApp. They're texting each other. They're not using the types of secure communication equipment they would need so that prying eyes can't see what they're doing.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Same thing that makes Russia so difficult to conquer in its history, you and I have talked about sort of the Russian strategic perspective and why they feel threatened and why they have good reason to feel threatened. They've been invaded over and over and over again from the West. And you can, if you put yourself in their shoes for a second, you can imagine why they would be afraid of NATO and why that really disturbs them. At the same time, though, nobody's ever really conquered Russia. And that's because you have to go over incredibly long distances and maintain supply chains in the dead of really harsh winters and things like that. So all of that is coming to play in the opposite direction too. So when Russia wants to get offensive and when it wants to project its power out to the Carpathians and go through Ukraine, it also has long supply chains. This is not a simple military operation. It's a major military operation that's costing Russia a lot of money. You alluded to Georgia and we were talking about this before we hopped on the episode.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I don't know exactly why they're having all these struggles. I can tell you that war is really hard. It's not as easy. It's not like you get to play Age of Empires and you push the pins on the screen and everything goes exactly the way you want to. It's really difficult. And war is really difficult because it's about a lot of unsexy stuff like supply chains and about getting fuel from one place to the other and making sure that their field rations for soldiers that are there on time. So at the simplest level, the reason things aren't going well for Russia right now is because they didn't have realistic objectives apparently going in. And so they haven't had enough rations to feed their soldiers. A lot of their soldiers weren't expecting this and were surprised to be there. Their logistical supply chains have taken time to go up and they didn't have an information strategy ready for a conflict that was going to be prolonged like this. So the first reason that they're having trouble is because their initial plan didn't go very well. The second though, and this is just a factor of the geography in this part of the world.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Along that side, but you know, I still like there's the tactics of war, which I know I'm by no means an expert at. I sort of have to be proficient with it. But then there's the strategic objectives. And that's where I usually spend most of my time thinking about. And from the get-go, the strategic objective has been get to keep, decapitate the government, get rid of Zelensky, get a pro-Russian in there, make sure the information war doesn't go against Russia. And they are still technically no closer to doing that than they were at the beginning of the week. And considering the level of force that Russia's deployed here, that's a pretty shocking development. I don't know how long it can continue. You would think that eventually Russian numbers and Russian firepower will overwhelm the Ukrainians, especially since the Ukrainians are not getting much more than weapon shipments from outside. But people like me are surprised they've made it this far.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On in the north, which is really, I don't know the polite term for it, it has really just been a disaster from the get-go, and they are struggling to correct it. They still have not been able to completely knock out Ukrainian air superiority. They have not been able to make any progress moving forward at Kyiv. Actually, I think it was yesterday, they restarted operations, offensive operations, I should say, after kind of getting their logistical dispositions taken care of. They weren't able to take any additional land. You even had reports of Ukrainians counterattacking some of these military convoys that are outside of Kiev. And then I think a lot of the media footage from the last day or two has been the bombing along the second axis there in Kharkiv, where they're making some headway, I guess, but that really seems to be more about intimidation and more about, I hesitate to say this, but maybe it's a warning to the rest of Ukraine and especially to Kyiv about what a siege might really look like because there's been a lot of destruction.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, sure. So, this is from the Institute for the Study of War, which is a wonderful resource, and they do a good job of also showing you where they're sourcing reports that allow them to make these sorts of maps in their reports. So if you haven't checked them out, and this is a topic that is of interest to you, it's a great resource for people like me. You can see on here they've made it fairly easy for folks to read. There are four key axes. And if everything was going for the Russians like it was out of Crimea, you and I probably wouldn't be having this conversation. This would already be a fait accompli. Because out of Crimea, Russia seems to be achieving many of its strategic objectives. It's the first city that it took was down there in Crimea. It's been able to link up with Donetsk and Luhansk. It has taken over most of the Black Sea ports, not all. Odessa is still there, and that's an important one. But it has made a lot of progress. And that's also where Russian forces were in some ways the strongest. So maybe that's not surprising. What's surprising has been from the get-go, what's going on.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that it can achieve some of its military objectives in Russia. The Russian economy is in free fall due to stronger than expected sanctions against it led by some of these European countries like Germany that have been willing to be stronger than they were necessarily last week. Ukraine is still there defending itself. So that's kind of where we are right now.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Continues not to go well. They have not been able to really make any progress around the capital city of Kiv. They have made some progress in the south coming from Crimea, but then they're also bombing Ukrainian cities. I guess the goal there is to intimidate the Ukrainian resistance into deteriorating, but it's having the opposite effect. In some ways, it's actually making voices, particularly in the West, more suspicious of Russia going forward. And I guess the last thing we should note is that as we're recording, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators are meeting for the second time since this war started off. I wouldn't expect too much to come out of that, but they did meet once before. And if you're a naive doe-eyed optimist, maybe you think that there is some way to come down from all of this. But unfortunately, I think where we are right now is the Russian military seems to be coiling and trying to fix all of its mistakes.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, I mean, so much has been happening that it's like all these days feel like their weeks and in and of themselves, the Lenin quote that I feel like everybody's been saying, but I'll say it too, is that, you know, sometimes their years where nothing happens and then there are weeks where decades happen. And it definitely has felt like every day is like is another decade. So if we go back on a weak timeline, I think the most important thing, well, there are a couple of very important things that have happened over the course of the past week. The first and most important is the way Germany has done a complete and total 180. Because German foreign policy, and I think Putin was expecting that Germany was going to be relatively friendly towards Russia going forward, that has not been the case. And not only that, Germany is talking about spending an extra $100 billion on military armaments. It's talking about building LNG terminals very quickly. That was a major move. The second thing, though, is just that the Russian invasion in Ukraine”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, I'm Director of Geopolitical Analysis at Cognitive Investments and also the chief strategist at perch perspectives. And if you can't get enough of me in those locations, I write a monthly column for the guys at Lykeon.”
2022-03-04 · Forward Guidance · Kharkiv Under Siege Yet Russian Oil Still Flows | Jacob Shapiro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT