2.5 years to halve the reserves, the spend cannot be linear and I also don’t think they need to get to zero to have a collapse.
… The economy is being funded by the cash reserves, which increases inflation, which leads to another round of interest rate hikes to combat inflation, which makes it harder to borrow money, which is necessary for economic growth. Eventually, the cash reserves will run out. It took 2.5 years to deplete half the Russian reserves. Russia withdrew $37 billion to cover deficits in December 2022. It withdrew $20 billion to cover deficits in December 2023. It only has $54 billion left.
That’s cool, but I’d like to see them start selling any meaningful amounts of their gold reserves. Putin was preparing for sanctions since 2006 and they currently hold 2,335.85 tonnes of gold that is worth approximately $144.94 billion. They also produce circa $20 billion worth of gold per year with plans to ramp it up a bit. Not enough to cover the war effort, but it helps them. Once this chart goes down we’ll know they’re in trouble.
The question I have is - how to get India off of the Russian oil supply?
That gold is about to be worth only the effort to pick it up and take it back home if you’re any sort of militarily-inclined nation.
Russia is hanging by a thread. Once the chaos starts and once the shitstain has its access to a nuclear button revoked on account of bullet through cranium, anyone with a big enough dick can waltz into Russia and “secure” the gold reserves for future investment, protecting it from the country’s impending civil war.
At least I hope. Fuckers stole my country’s gold reserves, I can only revel in the idea that they’d face the same.
The question I have is - how to get India off of the Russian oil supply?
That wouldn’t be good for the world economy. All of India’s consumption would have to come from the world’s supply driving up prices noticeably across the globe (and possibly hurting the efforts in Ukraine because of the association of high oil prices).
The better question is “How do we get India to pay even less for russian oil?”
How confident are we that we would know if they did start selling the gold?
Two thirds of it is kept in one building in Moscow, I’m reading.
Just saying.
Does Russia even have border guards anymore? Couldn’t some random people just get past the border, shoot some fucks standing next to a building, load some gold into a truck and roll out?
