Almost all the most important and interesting financial news in Russia and the world in a week: neuroconfiscation of cybermine for deepfakes, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation condemned sweet interest for sweet gifts, privatization of Chelyabinsk factories, measurement of recessions in Europe, as well as trillionization of Bitcoin.

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.

Key rate still 16%

The Central Bank of the Russian Federation held another scheduled meeting, at which it left the key rate at 16%. Inflation remains quite high (7.4%), unemployment is low, the forecast of economic growth according to the Central Bank remains high – therefore, it is still too early to lower the rate.

Films went public (with cotton)

Another hype IPO (initial placement of shares) took place on the Russian stock market: IT company “Diasoft”, which actually makes software for the financial sector, placed 8% of shares at a price of 4,500 rubles.

It is said that the level of excitement here turned out to be a record: more than 100 thousand retail investors wanted to touch the shares, and the total volume of purchase applications exceeded the volume of supply more than 10 times. Taking into account such demand, quotations immediately after placement jumped up by +40%, and at the end of the week they settled at the level of about 6,000 rubles. (about a third higher than the IPO price).

As you and I discussed in a separate long article, such an excellent return on the first day after the placement is not the most unusual thing in the world of IPOs. What is the ambush here, it is quite clear from the example of the case with Diasoft:

• The more people willing to buy a share, the more cheerfully it jumps up after placement;

• But also: the more investors want to participate, the fewer shares each of them will get.

As a result, most fans of filmstrips generously poured shares of the company at the level of 1-2% of the volume for which they applied. The nuance here is that when submitting an application for participation in the IPO, it is necessary to completely freeze cash in the broker’s account in the full amount of the submitted application. So all these good returns a la “+40% per day” in terms of the invested capital (and the real term of its “fixation”) look far from impressive.

All privatizations are unequal, but some are even more unequal

As the Nobel laureate Stiglitz said, perestroika privatization in Russia was continuous, well, if not entirely legitimate. The Russian prosecutor’s office has been digesting this insult inside itself, as if in a pulp, for almost 33 years – and now, therefore, it finally got up from the oven to correct all this blatant injustice.

For the past few years, there have been regular news reports that RAPTO discovered procedural flaws in the privatization of this or that plant in the early 90s, so it must be taken back into state ownership as a matter of urgency.

Last week, such deficiencies were “found” in relation to three plants of Chelyabinsk Electrometallurgical Plant, which make ferroalloys for military steel. I don’t know what the subtext is – perhaps Yuri Antipov (the owner of the plant and number 175 in the Forbes ranking of the richest businessmen in Russia-2021) somehow went into the wrong office incorrectly, out of etiquette.

Tinkoff and de-unification of the whole country

The Tinkoff bank logo has long been adorned with the stylization of the Tinkoff family coat of arms. The coat of arms depicts a unicorn. But this noble animal was treacherously culturally appropriated by the opposition (mostly on Twitter) in 2023 – so it has already become completely “indecent” to sculpt a logo with such seditious symbols everywhere.

In short, last week the yellow bank went through a rebranding (relogotyping?) and has now become just a black letter on a yellow shield.

But the Ministry of Justice refused to admit its defeat, and the next day struck back: awarded Oleg Tynkov himself with the status of a foreign agent. So now, it turns out, the bank is, as it were, promoting its foreign agent logo? 🤔

In this regard, I suggest to the bank’s management not to delay in retaliating, and to rebrand into an even safer version as soon as possible. I have already prepared a suitable option in MS Paint, I give you an idea:

The new season of the series “Confiscate. Punish. Ban!” (In this case – a cyber foreign agency spin-off)

The President of the Russian Federation signed the law on confiscation of property for fakes about the army (and everything else), it will come into force on February 25.

Almost simultaneously with this, there were reports that the Ministry of Statistics, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Roskomnadzor were instructed to invent special punishments for deepfakes by November 1, 2024.

You’re thinking the same thing I’m thinking right now, right?

As recently as last week, a bill was submitted to the State Duma to prohibit Russian individuals and legal entities from paying for advertising to foreign agents, as well as advertising these foreign agents. About 146% of Duma deputies have already signed the introduced law – so there are few doubts about its adoption.

The plan, of course, is as reliable as Swiss cheese: first, any public figure can literally fantasize foreign funding and on this basis recognize him as a foreign agent; and only then legally prohibit him from receiving income in Russia. Well, when this blogger starts to receive money from abroad – that’s where the puzzle will finally come together, immediately your vicious salesman’s guts, dear, heard!!

The Supreme Gift Court decided

An envious groom from Ulyanovsk gave the bride an iPhone 12 Pro Max and spent money on renovating her apartment. Then love faded, they broke up – and he sued her for “unjust enrichment”. The case reached the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, which ruled that parting is not a valid reason for returning all gifts.

I assume that from now on, all pontorezis of Ulyanovsk will give gifts only under a receipt with a list of mandatory points of mutual civil-legal obligations, which must be accepted for the final entry into ownership of the gift object.

Inflation in the United States is falling, but it does so without respect for analysts

In the USA, they published data on inflation based on the results of January – 3.1% per annum. This is lower than in December (3.4%), but higher than expected by forecasters (2.9%). Because of this, everyone became upset, the market began to believe a little less in the rapid and decisive reduction of the Fed rate, yields on ten-year US government bonds increased to 4.3% (at the end of 2023 it was 3.8%).

Countries are technically measured by recessions by garages

Economists have declared a technical recession in Japan: the country’s GDP has been falling for two quarters in a row. For this, the samurai were written out of the title of the 3rd world economy, and now Germany is there. In general, according to the results of 2023, the German economy also fell by 0.3% – but it did so in zigzags, so no one (yet) calls it a technical recession.

In Great Britain, too, by the way, she is. Technical. Recession! It is not easy in this Europe of yours now…

SORA SORA SORA

OpenAI rolled out a new neuromodel Sora, this time dedicated to generating videos from text prompts. And there is just a complete pile of ass!

Previous neural network video generators were mainly divided into two characteristic subclasses:

1. “Gif animation”, when a branch of a sakura moves a little on beautiful pictures and the camera lens shakes a little back and forth.

2. “Lovecraft’s Chthonic Nightmare on a Mushroom Diet” where three-eyed humanoids eat pizza into their ear while giggling demonically.

A new model from Altman… In short, see for yourself:

The guys, simply by tradition, piled up terabytes of incoming video data of all kinds and sizes, blew up the model as much as the available computer allowed, and voila – magic came out! Detailed high-quality videos with a sufficient level of consistency (permanence of objects). Sequential movements in the 3D world. Adequate interaction of objects with each other. In short, read more on the OpenAI website, or Kotenkov on the channel (Ihor, come on, we’ve already had a longread!).

The model itself is not yet publicly available. It is clear that the given examples of generations are in some sense specially selected by OpenAI to cause a wow effect (although they also provide examples of jambs on their website). But even so – the demonstrated jump in quality is still impressive as hell!

And to the news of the crypt

• The price of Bitcoin exceeded 50k dollars, which capitalization is $1 trillion. And there are still 2 months left before the halving, such a tusemun!

• The guys at JPMorgan came up with a thesis on the topic “of course it’s cool that your cypherpunk Tether is registered as a legal entity outside the US – but shit, everyone is so afraid of the long arms of US regulators that they will do whatever they ask.” Do you remember, for example, how in the wave of sanctions against Tornado Cash, cryptans praised USDT, which did not block the corresponding wallets (unlike USDC)? So, a few months ago, the people of Tezeriv blocked everything as a result. And there was noise!

• The sentencing of Changpeng Zhao (ex-head of Binance), who pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting money laundering, was postponed from February 23 to April 30. Do you think they will be jailed as a result?

Good news of the week

Let’s be honest, last week was such that it’s hard to single out anything good. Unless I can personally share: I got married on February 14!

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I have more financial news and author analytics in the Telegram channel RationalAnswer.