All the most important and interesting financial news in Russia and the world for a week: Durov is ready to leak your data to the authorities, 26 subsidized mortgages per person, zero-coupon bonds Savings for humanitarians, laws on childfree propaganda and insulting officials, the rise of Chinese shares, as well as the takeover of online poker rooms from Omsk.

Hamster Gate: An ancient prophecy has come true

🐹 The Hamster Kombat token finally hit crypto exchanges at 1 cent and immediately fell by a third to 0.65 cents. As calculated by Sasha Ilyin, an average hamster breeder became fabulously rich received only about 4 (four) dollars per brother. In principle, instead of staring at the screen for many days, it was easier to stand for a few hours at the cash register in “Tasty and Point”.

Of the influencers I follow, Oleksandra Wald was able to boast of a record earnings of as much as $100 (and this despite the fact that she has been teaching 17,000 wannabe Kryptans who subscribed to her to properly stomp a hamster almost every day for the past few months).

🪒 In numbers, the distribution of tokens among hamsters looks like this: out of 300 million players, more than half recognized any tokens as deliberately unworthy; and another 2.3 million were cynically banned for cheating. There is a funny article on Smartlab about a guy who “invested” 492,000 rubles in the salary of a hundred hired schoolboys – to end up being labeled a “cheat” and left without tokens. In the text, he calls out the developers of Hamster Kombat for having “greed in their minds” – bro, I don’t mean to imply anything, but you do realize that sounds kind of ironic right?

Durov started on the path of correction

🐌 Pavlo Durov, after a month of communication with the French gendarmes (hopefully, there were no operative-search measures using sparkling wine from the Champagne region), announced his new personal goal: to fight all illegality in Telegram. From now on, IP addresses and phones of “violators” will be effectively leaked to all countries of the world in response to “valid legal requests.” Russians and Belarusians be like: “thank you, Macron, in general, I did it beautifully, now we will finally heal!!”.

Also, by the way, during the interrogation, Durov revealed the amount of his income: 1 dirham per year. 50% of this amount continues to be claimed by Iryna Bolgar, who spams new “family photos” from the archive every week.

Russian budget

🐌 The Accounting Chamber of the Russian Federation counted 115,000 borrowers who took out two or more subsidized mortgages (a total of one trillion rubles). One chelik was able to get as many as 26 loans with a preferential rate. An anecdote about the nuance came out: it seems to be about the same process, but one feels “effective investment in real estate with a cheap shoulder”, and the other – “financing a scam with taxpayers’ money.” And you, the reader, on which side of this joke are you?

🐌 Bloomberg unearthed the secret (so far) draft budget of the Russian Federation for 2025 – and it turns out that military spending will increase by about 27% compared to the previous plan. Apparently, somewhere there, a marmot climbed out of the hole and told the government “guys, sorry – I see a shadow, at least another year of winter!”. Total defense and security spending will reach about 40% of the federal budget.

State regulation news

🐌 The government commission has approved legislative amendments, according to which it is planned to introduce administrative fines (up to 50,000 rubles for individuals and up to 1 million rubles for legal entities) for participation in illegal attraction of investments from individuals – this is if it is done without a license from the Central Bank, or offer to an unlimited number of people those things that only qualified investors need to touch. Financial bloggers, who are used to selling “jeans” to everyone in a row, should strain at this point.

🐌 Russian management companies have long been asking the Central Bank to organize for them the opportunity to open foreign accounts for their clients and trade “over the hill”. They write that the Central Bank says “no problem, just cover the risks of blocking sanctions on clients’ assets entirely with your own capital.” To this, the CCs answer “it’s okay, you’re already here, we didn’t really want to go to these foreign markets of yours…”.

🐌 Also, do you remember that in March 2022, the Central Bank introduced temporary restrictions on the withdrawal of currency abroad? So, last week they were extended again for another six months (for the fourth time already).

News of the Russian market

🐌 Oschadbank issues a coupon-free bond for 5 years with a 50% discount. They promise reliable earnings in the amount of “20% per annum”. I am asking for urgent help from humanitarians – what is the trick??

🐌 Meanwhile, ruble government bonds with OFZ-IN inflation protection allow you to fix a real yield of almost 10% per annum (above inflation) for 6 years. Imagine if you could pull the same trick on US TIPS and guarantee yourself 10% in dollars on top of inflation? I won’t hide it – I would blow on the whole cutlet… 🤔

🐌 On September 27, Mosbourzha began to calculate the new index of real estate funds with the ticker MREF – to be honest, it sounds more like a suitable cliché for Herman Gref’s cat, but that’s okay.

News of the “crazy printer”

Block of news from the rubric “hell proposals of deputies, some of which will eventually be forgotten, but some of it will turn into real laws”:

Blocking news

🐌 They write that there is a high probability that the Roskomnadzor will quickly block the messenger for group communication of gamers and cryptans called Discord.

🐌 The guys conducted a mini-research and found out that over the last year, Apple drank almost a hundred VPN applications from the Russian Appstore. And Tim Cook was not put in a French prison!

A plate of rice for everyone (and let no one leave offended!)

🐌 The Chinese Central Bank decided that it was enough to endure all this and announced a mega-package giga-mer to support the economy. They promise to give money to everyone! The MCHI China Shares ETF is on a roll, up 20% for the week.

News of artificial intelligence

🐌 OpenAI has been attracting billions of investors’ money for the last couple of years – but at the same time it seems to remain a “non-profit” organization (in the meals for investors there were touching phrases like “it’s better to consider your contribution… er… a donation!”). Well, it seems that it is no longer possible to plausibly break this comedy: they write that the company is about to be turned into a standard commercial startup. Allegedly, in the conditions of the last round of funding, there was a caveat such as “the money will have to be returned if OpenAI is not reorganized within two years.”

Coincidentally, information appeared in the press that the awarding of Sam “I have no financial interests in OpenAI” to Altman 7% of the company (this is, for a moment, 10 yards of dollars) is being discussed. Sam himself quickly called the labor team to a zoom call and said that this was definitely not true. And now there is more news: Miru Murati, the former CTO of OpenAI, is leaving the company.

🐌 But James Cameron, on the contrary, joined the board of directors of Stability AI (these are the ones that generate images in Stable Diffusion). I think that old James is just planning, as soon as the II uprising begins – to take the camera out of his pocket and shoot the prequel “Terminator”, as they say, right from the front lines…

Crypto stories of the week

🐌 The trial of Caroline Allison, the combat girlfriend of Sam Bankman-Fried, has ended. Many thought that she would not go to jail at all, but in the end she was sentenced to 2 years in prison. That’s how we learned that the strategy of “handing over the ex with the bodybags” leads to a 92% reduction in prison time compared to the strategy of “protecting Chewbacca” (see SBF, who got 25 years).

Longread of the week

🐌 The Russian Bot Army That Conquered Online Poker. An article in Bloomberg about the secret corporation of AI poker kings from Omsk with quotes from Max Katz – as they say, what’s not to like?

Sciencepop of the week

🐌 Polina Losyeva talks about why scientists cannot agree among themselves – what exactly is the cause of the obesity epidemic that many developed countries suffer from?

Interview of the week

🐌 In this column, I talk about one podcast I listened to last week: this time it’s Elon Musk on Lex Friedman’s podcast (again). This time with the other guys from Neuralink. The podcast is almost 9 hours long! Yurii Dud frantically bites the microphone cord out of jealousy.

As always, I talk more about what I found interesting about this podcast in the video version of this digest here.

Good news of the week

🐌 Changpeng Zhao (the owner of the Binance crypto exchange) escaped from an American prison after serving a four-month sentence. And this means that he still has time to take part in our iPhone 15 Pro raffle, which ends in a week!

Bonus posts

• Posted a continuation of the story with my public appeal to Andrii Movchan regarding his GEIST foundation.

• Explained why investment professionals will frown upon your attempts to measure portfolio returns calculated through IRR.

• A post about how the positive declared return of the ARKK fund by Katie Wood can be combined with the fact that they ended up burning 7 billion of investor money.