Elon Musk’s cybertaxi, as well as new laws from a mad printer

Elon Musk’s cybertaxi, as well as new laws from a mad printer

All the most important and interesting financial news in Russia and the world for a week: dollar at 97 rubles, childlessness tax, confiscations from emigrants, onerous citizenship, Unilever left Russia, blood revenge for Wildberries, RKN pumped the slowdown, Nobel Prizes for AI, crypto traders from the FBI , as well as news about Probiznesbank.

A dollar at 97

🐌 Last week, the ruble continued to fall violently, by Friday the Central Bank had counted the dollar at 97 rubles. (At the end of September, the exchange rate was about 5% lower). At the same time, the government relaxed the requirements for exporters regarding the mandatory sale of foreign exchange earnings – this will not help to strengthen the ruble either.

Breeding mission Positive is with us again

🐌 The Central Bank resumed the murky additional issue of shares of the company Positive Technologies with signs of disadvantage for minorities – apparently they figured out how to arrange all this to make it look more decent. Oleksandr Yeliseev is not happy about this (please ask him for more details about the situation).

The shopping basket of the average Russian in a vacuum

🐌 By the way, Fininda has a cool post comparing the “average” consumer basket of a Russian, by which inflation is considered, with the spending structure of Oleksandr himself (he is, of course, middle class).

An abstract Russian in a vacuum spends a lot on food, cars and utilities, but very modestly travels, gets educated and gives gifts. If you have a different consumption basket, you will feel inflation on your skin a little differently!

Heading “Mad Printer”

Strange ideas of deputies regarding new draft laws, some of which may eventually become real laws:

🖨 Andriy Gurulev (a member of the defense committee) wants to introduce a childlessness tax. Why exactly does he need your children – I think it is almost clear.

Gurulev looks at you as if he wants to say “HEAR, BIRTH!”

🖨 The State Council of Tatarstan sleeps and sees to start arresting the property of emigrants who oppose the interests of the country. The Cabinet of Ministers gave a positive opinion on the draft law, but explained that the range of possible offenses against Russia “is not limited to the norms listed in the draft law” – it turns out that the list should be expanded.

🖨 The State Duma introduced a bill to make the presence of foreign citizenship an aggravating circumstance when committing a crime. Lawyers timidly ask “but how… the constitution?… everyone’s equality before the law?…”.

Russian business news

🐌 Unilever sold its Russian business for half a billion euros – Knorr cubes and Ax deodorants now become completely Russian staples. The buyer was Arnest Group, which previously successfully bought the Russian breweries Heineken for €1 and €100 million in debt. We must admit – the guys have a business streak!

🐌 Meanwhile, the government of the Russian Federation is strengthening the conditions for the sale of businesses in Russia by foreigners. Previously, you had to sell your Russian business “to whoever needs it” with a 50% discount from the market price and additionally pay 15% to the budget, but now you have to give a 60% discount + pay to the budget 35% of the deal. It turns out that the total discount for outgoing foreigners reaches 74% of the market value (how it is determined is a separate issue). After all, soon foreign investors will have to pay extra from their own pockets to be deprived of Russian assets! 🤔

🐌 Kadyrov threatened two State Duma deputies and one senator with blood revenge over the Wildberries case. The first video apologies of the deputies appeared the very next day. (After the previous news, you probably wanted to ask “why will foreigners pay extra for exiting Russian business”? Haha, well, that is.)

RKN pressed Discord

🐌 Roskomnadzor blocked Discord in Russia. Press F! At the same time, the head-headed guys from RKN invented a legal justification to get the opportunity to slow down any online resource without a court decision (on the basis of an out-of-court decision of the Prosecutor General’s Office). And if you think about it, blocking is a kind of “100% slowdown”, right? 🤔

Roblox is hell!

🐌 Hedge fund “Business killer” Hindenburg accused the game company Roblox of exaggerating the statistics of gamer users and disregarding the safety of children. The report has words about “the hell of grooming, pornography, violent content and extremely offensive language”. Guys, surely this is not about Twitter? Anyway, the company’s shares fell by 9% at the moment, but then grew back. Maybe this “hell” is not so terrible for business?

“Interesting statistics” section

🐌 70% of Denmark’s GDP growth is accounted for by the pharmaceutical industry. Who said “Ozempik”? By the way, are there those who inject themselves among my subscribers?

Cybercrab from Elon Musk

🦀 Elon Musk showed us the unmanned Cybercrab robot taxi… sorry, Cybercab. Nice!

Wow, what!

Inside, a steering wheel with pedals was specially cut out so that there would be no doubt that if this wonderwaffle finally goes, only Ilonivskyi Grok AI will be behind the wheel. In the current Tesla autopilot, the driver has to constantly feel the bagel and watch – no matter what happens, isn’t it time for the railroad to take control?

Artificial intelligence Nobel laureates

🐌 The Nobel Prize in Physics was suddenly awarded “for AI” to Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield. Why physics? Well, just the category “For artificial intelligence” Nobel in 1901 did not think to invent… In his speech, Hinton said: he is proud that his student recently almost fired Sam Altman from OpenAI. Our elephant, in short!

Geoffrey Hinton. The look on your face when you think that Sam Altman of OpenAI has been underrated after all…

🐌 In chemistry, by the way, the Nobel Prize was also awarded for teaching a neural network to predict the structure of proteins. How quickly do you think the prize will turn into “giving awards to tin researchers in all fields of science”?

Crypt news

🐌 Guys from the FBI made a fake cryptocurrency to catch those who manipulate crypto exchange prices. They turned out to be guys with Russian roots led by Oleksiy Andryunin (crypto company Gotbit). It is interesting that in the process, the people of Fbriv were able to raise $25 million – maybe it is time for them to retrain as crypto-traders?

Oleksiy Andryunin looks like a person who moves through life clearly

🐌 The court approved a payment plan to the affected customers of the FTX crypto exchange with compensation of 118% of the dollar equivalent of their losses. Those who went to the Bitcoin exchange are naturally dissatisfied, because the crypto has grown a lot since then.

Longread of the week: a suitable book!

🐌 Our old friend Dima Nikitenko suddenly released his book about investments. For a long time, Dima was the author of the most adequate free online course on investments in the Runet, then he removed it under paywall, and now he supplemented it with new materials and released it in the form of a book 14 times (!) cheaper. I warmly recommend it to everyone, I myself respect Nikitenko’s caustic approach very much – if there were more such financial bloggers, the world would be a better place.

On the cover it looks like, sorry, an “info product” – but inside the content is as suitable as possible, don’t let the first impression confuse you.

Interview of the week

🐌 My conversation about Probusinessbank-gate with Plyushchev. (Sorry, I haven’t had time for podcasts, and this column is needed this time so that I can spew negative energy on the topic in a video digest. For those who are interested, here is a timecoded link to my recent stream of thoughts about PBB.)

For those who are interested in the topic – here in this post I have collected all relevant links about Probusinessbank. Unfortunately, I have almost all the information posted on TwitterI have already made about five long threads there – I understand that not everyone is comfortable reading there, but there are no other options yet, unfortunately. A very short TLDR: Yes, everything points to the fact that bankers from Probusinessbank simply stole money from there.

Good news of the week

🐌 Many people are said to have had some more compensation returned to their brokerage accounts for blocked assets as part of the exchange. Have you checked to see if you were charged anything?

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