Almost all the most important and interesting financial news in Russia and the world in a week: the Central Bank started to raise the interest rate, the Ministry of Digitization wants to make a mega-database for AI, the Central Market has an online sale with discounts of 99.9%, and in England they introduce a crime for cryptomemes.

Financial news from Russia, unfortunately, mostly does not correspond to the spirit of Habra. So you can read the full text version of this news release here, or watch the video.

Nabiullina wants to add 1% to the rate on your bank deposit

Last week, the last summer meeting of the CPU was held, and here are the results:

• After a long pause of a year and a half, the key rate was increased by 1 p.p. up to 8.5% per annum – in the name of combating rising inflation. To everyone who managed to get cheap loans – my respect!

• Also, the Central Bank introduces a new feature called “mirroring the expenses of the National Welfare Fund” (National Welfare Fund) – the disbursement of this reserve cup for current expenses will now be accompanied by the sale of yuan by the Bank of Russia. Nabiullina insists that this is not a measure of support for the ruble – but this factor in itself, of course, works to strengthen it.

At the press conference, Elvira Sahipzadivna said, “What, you really banned all citizens of the Russian Federation from March to make any transactions with securities on foreign exchanges? what should we do now?’ – To which she firmly and clearly answered “we ourselves, lol, next question!”.

New laws: personal income tax of 13% for non-resident employees and credit holidays for six months

The boys and girls who work in the State Duma also want to go on summer vacation as soon as possible – that’s why they set themselves the goal of accepting during the past week everything that they wanted to accept for a long time.

In particular, finally, in the third reading, the law was approved that emigrants from the Russian Federation who continue to work for Russian companies after leaving (both in the status of employed and freelancers) from 2024-2025 will pay personal income tax at the level of 13/15%, regardless of their tax status. in some cases it was possible not to pay at all).

Also, the State Duma legalized the right to credit holidays for consumer loans for Russians: if your average monthly income has fallen by more than 30%, you can suspend bank payments for up to 6 months. However, interest on the debt will still be accrued – so, gentlemen investment junkies, schemes with a “free shoulder” for investments on the stock exchange will not work.

The Ministry of Digital Affairs wants to create a single information system to rule them all

And continuing the theme of fun bills: the Ministry of Digital has proposed the most interesting idea. Let’s, they say, oblige businesses and state structures to transfer various data about people (financial or otherwise) to a single state database – so that neural networks can then be trained on it.

But do not worry: the state system will be super-secure and protected from hacking (this will be strictly monitored by a comrade major from the FSB), and all data will, of course, be strictly anonymized! This means that there is no need to obtain any consent for the aggregation of personal data in a special database from citizens.

Guys, help Dashenka to understand – what can go wrong here, even though there are no risks, right?

Oleksiy “Khulinomist” Markov invested in a snowball

Meanwhile, “multi-billion” M&A deals continue to happen in Russia: last week, my friend Lyosha Markov issued a press release that he invested 10 million rubles in the Snowball Income service for accounting for portfolio investments. The terms of renaming the project to “Huliball Income” have not yet been announced, but anything can happen…

In fact, normal accounting of an investment portfolio – so that all data is pulled from where it is needed automatically, the results are considered correct, and it is possible to turn analytics back and forth in different sections – this is a cool and useful thing. I am still in the habit of maintaining my portfolio manually in Excel tables, and updating the data in it every month causes me a lot of pain.

So, if the guys, as Markov writes, are really looking for the highest quality and most convenient investment accounting service for Russian investors, then I can only wish them luck.

In 20 years of working in the financial markets, I have never come across such a convenient tool for tracking my investments. Before investing, I used Snowball Income for a long time to manage my own portfolios, and the founders impressed me with their professionalism and responsiveness.

Oleksii Markov

Russians spent 15 billion rubles on a good life for one person

The Ministry of Internal Affairs reports that the financial pyramid “Life is Good” stole 15 billion rubles from 18 thousand “depositors”. The guys promised modest profitability – only 25% per year (probably that’s why they were able to last for 9 years, since 2014). But the person whose life is definitely good is Roman Vasylenko, the founder of the pyramid, who has not been caught yet!

Meanwhile, Tinkoff exposed the guys called In Touch Media – they promise a return of 985% per year, but in the crypt. My prediction: they will not live for nine years, no – they are too greedy.

Dear Russians, please do not give money to scammers! You still have enough opportunities to somehow lose them, to be honest.

Online sale in the Central Shopping Center with discounts of 99.9%

A guy from Volgograd noticed that things are sold on the website of TsUM at a price approximately 800 times lower than the usual one – well, he ordered all kinds of elite jackets for 19 rubles. The total order came to 2,787 rubles, while the total “savings” reached 2.3 million rubles.

In the end, the store did not take the “honestly bought” item, and the boys had a bite to eat in court. The first three courts decided that TsUM is right and is not responsible for the glitches of crooked web programmers. But the Supreme Court decided that although the situation for the store is sad, a public offer is a public offer, so the Volgograd fashion designer should not be refused either. Currently, the case went to the second round of consideration in the courts.

SPB Exchange is thinking about participating in the creation of a crypto exchange in Belarus

Actually, the subject There are no official statements from the exchange, nothing – only mysterious sources of RBC. But it sounds funny.

Stay tuned for my cool article about the bankruptcy of Credit Suisse 50 years later!

The Swiss parliament appointed a special commission to investigate in detail the circumstances surrounding the bankruptcy of Credit Suisse – and to make sure that everything was strictly honest and transparent. But the results of the investigation were classified in advance, just in case, for up to 50 years – and then suddenly everything will turn out too transparently.

Twitter will be renamed to X

Elon Musk has announced that Twitter is final will go from the old brand and bird theme to the billionaire’s favorite letter “X”; and that if someone posts a version of the new logo to him in the standards feed, it will be posted the next day will send it in production.

I wonder if before everyone said “shut it up” – will they say “fuck it” after the rebranding? 🤔

Astrologers have announced a week of artificial intelligence dulling

Last week, a bunch of materials were published with the link “ChatGPT is rapidly becoming stupid, alarm: in the past three months, the neural network has become 5 times worse at coding, and 50 times worse at solving mathematical problems! That’s what a study by the dudes at Stanford showed, and they ain’t gonna lie!!

It’s good that I read Ihor Kotenkov – in his “Sioloshnaya” it is explained why this is mostly nonsense and a crooked methodology with overly loud conclusions. For example, a more recent version of the neural network began to distinguish the code for the Python language for the convenience of the user with special identifiers – and researchers, instead of removing unnecessary formatting at the beginning of the answer, were afraid that “nothing will compile, stupid ZPT!”

Apple is preparing its own AI

For the last six months, the guys from Apple demonstratively did not hype the topic of neural networks and artificial intelligence. And here Bloomberg unearthed that all this time, it turns out, they were secretly sawing AI under the code name Ajax.

Fun fact: In Greek mythology, Ajax ended up with a cuckoo completely flying away from him, he tried to kill everyone, and then he completely lost his mind. I have a question for Apple: what exactly are you alluding to?

From the blood of Ajax grew a red hyacinth flower, on the petals of which, according to legend, you can see the letters “AI”.

Wikipedia

FTX almost saved humanity from extinction (but women got in the way)

Lawyers for the bankrupt FTX filed a new lawsuit against Sam Bankman-Fried: they claim that he is paying his lawyers in the main proceedings with the help of $10 million, which he previously fraudulently siphoned from the crypto exchange to his father. And this means that this money must also be taken and divided (literally, between the defrauded creditors of FTX).

There are interesting details in the lawsuit: a correspondence surfaced in which Gabriel Benkman-Fried (Sam’s younger brother) offered one of the top managers of FTX to buy an entire country called Nauru (a dwarf island nation in the Pacific Ocean) and equip it as a bunker for efficient altras. selflessly saved the human race.

Meanwhile, Sam himself is said to have sneakily leaked the secret diary of his former accomplice, Caroline Allison, to The Times newspaper. There is something interesting: it turns out that giving out other people’s money to manage his mistresses was a kind of hobby of a curly-haired Kryptonian. In addition to Caroline herself, who managed the Alameda family hedge fund, at some point he began to send loot by train to the Modulo fund – which, yes, was also managed by his other “ex”. In general, children, don’t mix fun & finance!

In England, criminal liability is threatened for cryptomemes

Do you remember when I joked in the last issue that soon memes will be equated to legally binding documents? So, not even a week has passed: the British financial regulator has declared that the cryptomeme is actually an advertisement for financial products; and for unscrupulous memes they will be imprisoned for a term of up to two years.

Good news of the week

The Central Bank issued a commemorative coin with Viktor Tsoi.

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