Russia is rapidly moving towards serious changes: the treasury is emptying, sanctions are rampant, Donbass is being prepared for a swap, and bitcoin is being sought for control. And this is only the first and most superficial snapshot of what has happened.
So, guesswork on who will be the next Prime Minister is in full swing, and this action is taking place against the background of a rapidly melting Reserve Fund, and the National Welfare Fund in 2019, according to expert forecasts, will lose its reserves. We will have to make “anti-people” decisions. These include, for example, reductions in social obligations of the state, raising the retirement age and increasing the length of service.
The latter should become a panacea for the gray sector: the economy will become more transparent and the Russian Pension Fund will be able to close the holes. Rucompromat has no doubts that today’s elections are being organized with one goal in mind – to pick a technical prime minister who, like Kirienko in 1998, will collect all the negativity and leave. In this case, the next prime minister will be someone who is not pitiful.
The development of cryptocurrencies also throws up worries and concerns. How to regulate pseudo-money, collect taxes from miners? No one knows this, but everyone is trying to regulate it. As a result, by the summer of 2018, lawmakers should determine the rules of mining and selling cryptocurrency. There are already proposals to allow only legal entities to mine, tax them, and trade cryptocurrency – like securities – on the stock exchange.
But the problem is, writes Rucompromat, that the production of bitcoins or similar does not have a single center. For the cryptocurrency market to be regulated, all processes must cease to be anonymous. In the blockchain system, on the basis of which cryptocurrencies are created and mined, this is impossible. The system is designed in such a way that anyone can mine anywhere.
Let’s take such a lucky miner as Colonel Zakharchenko. The name of this favorite of good luck is on everyone’s lips, and his mine is always looking up, even after a year in a pre-trial detention center. Recently, the investigation discovered another stash of this man, this time in his mother’s apartment. There they found 20 million rubles, 600 thousand euros and 20 thousand dollars. Earlier, one of Zakharchenko’s stash has already been gutted in favor of the state. And the total amount of Zakharchenko’s property, subject to confiscation, is about nine billion rubles: it is 27 apartments and parking spaces in elite areas of Moscow, as well as four expensive cars registered to relatives and acquaintances of the colonel. The General Prosecutor’s Office’s lawsuit for confiscation of property has already been filed with the court.
And yet, the atmosphere of the week is not just bitcoin. Most of all, it is filled with fear, and of a number of “friends” of the president and big state managers. Rucompromat notes that Russian companies hit by the sanctions are preparing to get a pound of fury: now the United States can be prosecuted around the world for helping such poor people, and any bank can lose its correspondent accounts in the United States for transactions with Sber and VTB.
US sanctions are designed in such a way that any European company can fall under them, so Washington does not need consent and cooperation with the EU, it is now dominant. This promises only problems and further isolation for our business. TMK is shamefully fleeing the United States, Sberbank is surrendering Europe. In such a situation, it is the right time to give the offender something not very necessary but pompous, some untouchable cow. And so suddenly a poll by the Levada Center appears and it turns out that only a third of Russia approves of what is happening in the DNR and LNR.
Russians in general are peculiar people, and in the understanding of Russian officials they are also absurd. For example, they have the nerve not to rejoice at the decline in inflation, moreover – not even to notice it. In October, according to Rosstat, inflation set a new post-Soviet minimum of 2.7%. Over the year, the growth of consumer prices has slowed 2.2 times, and since mid-summer – by 0.6 percentage points. And although the state statistics recorded record low values for 6 months in a row, consumers themselves did not notice it.
The survey conducted by the Central Bank showed that while in the first half of the year people saw small signs of slowing inflation (its observed level fell from 14% to 11.9%), in the second half of the year this process almost stopped. Over the summer, the indicator fell by only 0.6 percentage points, and in August, September and October, Russians estimated inflation at almost the same level – 11.2-11.3%.
As a result, the gap between the figure from Rosstat and the one obtained from the population surveys has reached a record: the observed inflation is 4.5 times higher than the official one. And how does the Central Bank explain all this? And very simply: the population refuses to see a victory over inflation simply because people “cannot yet” “believe” in it, laughs Rucompromat.