COLD WAR REDUX: Black Monday, Ukraine on Verge of War

(AMTV)

As we approach the weekend festivities with millions readying their green cups of beer for the St. Paddy’s Day celebration, the crisis in Ukraine that has escalated in recent weeks is preparing to boil over.

According to Business Insider, over 80,000+ Russian troops are preparing for the threat of war. What has mostly (arguably entirely) been manufactured by the West as a “stealth coup” is now threatening to literally destabilize European-Western relations with Russia and potentially rock financial markets on Monday. 

Warren Buffet made some very strange comments on Friday while speaking with CNBC, saying he would be “surprised a lot” if stock prices around the world dropped 50% or more from current levels in the near future. These are some shockingly eerie comments coming from a Wall Street insider notorious for his inside track in Washington and buddy-buddy with the White House and Barack Obama. Is Buffett trying to tell us something?

Why would one of the most influential Wall Street movers and shakers make a comment like this on the eve of the outbreak of war with Ukraine? Would you not be concerned if a commentator on CNN said he would not be surprised if Iran nuked Washington DC on Monday completely out of the blue?

Astute listeners can’t help but wonder if insiders are trying to telegraph upcoming events…  Adding more fuel to the fire, it has been widely reported that the Russian government along with elite business insiders have been aggressively transferring billions of dollars in U.S. security holdings (namely U.S. Treasuries) offshore. In other words, Russia’s oligarchs are transferring risk off the shores of North America’s balance sheets before the outbreak of a wider conflict.

Reports show that foreign central banks’ holdings of U.S. marketable securities fell in the week that ended Wednesday by a record $106.1 billion, of which were mostly U.S. Treasuries. The question bears, where are the Russian insiders moving their money and could they perhaps be transferring large sums into alternative currencies like the Chinese Yuan?

So what happens next in Ukraine?

Talks in London led by Obama messenger-boy John Kerry have broken down with notably hostile remarks from Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel warning that Russian annexation of Crimea would be received by western diplomats as a threat “and it would not only change the European Union’s relationship with Russia, she told the German parliament. “No, this would also cause massive damage to Russia, economically and politically.”

So will the EU and U.S. act on Russian sanctions, essentially shooting global financial markets in the foot and roiling the Russian ruble? Or will Obama cave once again like he did  in Syria and embarrass himself with more “red-line” comments?

What remains obvious to those following the events in Ukraine is that Putin is clearly not backing down and if anything is actually ramping up tensions with an incredible “non-violent” show of force earlier in the week with over 1500 Russian paratroopers descending from the sky at the Ukraine border as Crimea approaches its official referendum vote on Sunday. With no sign of letting up, Crimea is poised to be officially annexed by the Russia Federation before the weekend is out.

Financial markets in the West, although suffering their fifth consecutive day of losses on Friday with a -43.22 (-0.27%) drop in the DOW seem to have underestimated the impact EU sanctions imposed on Russia will have on European and U.S. based financial assets.

In what can only be called a Ponzi scheme, U.S. financial markets have been riding the coattails of tremendous artificial stimulus through quantitative easing and 0% interest rates for over 5 years now without letting up, hitting all-time highs in recent weeks and propping up even larger asset bubbles.

What happens to a ball of hot-air when sanctions are imposed on Russia and roughly 40% of natural gas and energy exports from Russia to Europe suddenly come to a grinding halt?

Will quant based trading systems in the West not fire sale all risk assets in a matter of milliseconds? One can’t help but play vivid flashbacks of the former Flash Crash and market panic in 2010 that roiled financial markets with a debilitating collapse in equity prices in a matter of seconds.

To add to the tensions, more evidence from Flight 370 released by an utterly inept (or intentionally so) U.S. intelligence community report that the missing Malaysian airline flight that departed Kuala Lampur last weekend with 239 passengers on board was in fact hijacked by rogue terrorists. Theories have developed, fueled by reports from the Wall Street Journal, that the plane may have flown up to an additional 5 hours after its last known radar contact.

Some in the alternative media (along with analysis first reported here at AMTV) have suggested that the plane was hijacked as part of a much larger and sinister terrorist plot. The likelihood that Flight 370 may have been docked secretively at a private hangar or U.S. military base with the intention of being equipped with a nuke for a second leg of its nefarious plot has to be assessed.

Although not likely, is it not possible that Flight 370 and the events in Ukraine are somehow connected? At the very least, the MSM has been using the fodder of the missing Malaysian flight conspiracy as part of a larger smokescreen to cover up the events in Ukraine.

Are European diplomats and their counterparts in the West really ready to interfere in the democratic process, a referendum vote of the majority in Crimea on Sunday? Is the Obama administration prepared for the consequences of poking a sleeping giant last remembered as serious Cold War threat? Or was this precisely the intention all along?

UKRAINE: 80,000 Russian Troops at Border Ready for War