“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.”

                                                                                                                                      Thomas Jefferson

Stanley Fischer: Now his appointment to the Fed makes more sense…to “help” Ukraine?

“[T]he geographical quantities in the calculations are more measurable and more nearly constant than the human.”

Sir Halford J. Mackinder, The Georaphical Pivot of History

There seems a lot more at play here with Russian troops now occupying the Crimea.  Robert Kaplan told us a couple of years ago what to expect in his brilliant book, The Revenge of Geography… 

…”It was an old story this, Europe versus Russia: a liberal sea power-as were Athens and Venice-against a reactionary land power-as was Sparta and Prussia… 

….read Currency Currents 3 March 2014

Global financial markets turned down on Thursday, and gold and treasuries gained as the crisis in Ukraine took a nasty turn with the mobilization of 150,000 troops amid the seizure of government buildings in the Crimea.

Charles Robertson, global chief economist at Renaissance Capital, talks about Crimea and says we’ve seen ‘three or four days of incredibly rapid moves’ and warns that Putin ‘doesn’t react rationally’…

                     It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”

                                                                                      Henry David Thoreau