📣 New Podcast! "Episode #190 - Alex Krainer and How All Financial Fuses Lead to London" on @Spreaker https://t.co/PQnASm1MOj

— Tom Luongo (Head Sneetch) (@TFL1728) August 29, 2024

04:00. I thought I'd lay out my observations.  July and August have been extremely eventful, and all of these events had something very interesting and common and that is the well understood pending default by Ukraine, which was expected at the end of July.  And there was frenzied activity around Ukraine's Bond Servicing, and between Ukraine's government and Starmer's cabinet.  Here's what's been happening.  2024 has been very bad for Ukraine.  It's become clear that they cannot win in their war against Russia, and already in January about 10% of people polled in Europe, on a sample of 17,000 people in 12 European countries, only 10% of them felt that Ukraine could win against Russia. Which tells you that's the True Believers, 10%, right?  So things are looking bleak and then the aid package gets stalled in US Congress for months, the $61 billion aid package.  And then in March, the World Bank gives Ukraine a $1.5 billion loan but what we learned from that is that the World Bank thinks that Ukraine state of finances is catastrophic and at the risk of dealing with Ukraine is extreme, meaning you can lend the money but you're not going to see it back.  That's bank talk for that.

06:00. So there's a lot of anxiety between the private bondholders who hold about $20 billion dollars worth of _________ Ukraine bonds.  When Russians launched their special military operation these private bondholders granted Ukraine a two-year grace period so you don't have to service your debt for 2 years.  That expires when?  It expired on the 1st of August, 2024, so 27 days ago.  In May, according to the Wall Street Journal, they start this discussion between a bondholding committee representing people like Black Rock among the Pimco and who knows who else and they start negotiating with Ukrainians because they're like, "Hey, you need to start servicing those bonds.  You need to start paying at least the interest," and so the Ukrainians are like, "We can't.  If you take a haircut, like 60%, then maybe we can talk.  And so there were negotiations going on, Ukrainians were demanding 60% reduction in debt and the bond holders were offering 22% so this gets to July then on 12th July they have these intense negotiations and by the 19th July they reached the agreement okay so ukrainians are going to start restructuring their debts they're going to be at 37% haircut for the bond holders and this happens in London on 18th July zelensky flies to London where the recently appointed Blair's salonski as his ambass ador as his ambassador to London who used to be the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces in Ukraine

1:16:40  Steve Hogarth put it in one of Marillion's songs, we don't even have the haves and the have nots, we have "the haves and the have-nothings." 

That's Britain, man. 

They had a poll in which 25% of the British people said they were going to have to switch off their heating this winter to survive financially.  Off!  And 48% of them said "Off or down," meaning maybe we'll heat a little bit, but that's half the population. 

1:17:31  And their leadership, as you pointed out in your article, the leadership is telling them "Well, you're probably going to have to suffer and you probably don't deserve to heat your homes," like a number of them are like "this is what you're going to have to do to save England."  Ah, no.  Fuck you.