Except re: Europe and Ukraine, his officials have been carrying it out for months. So maybe you should be a lil bit alarmed or you could just sneer. Tough call.

(e.g. here's Kristi Noem stumping for a Far Right Polish politician as per the NSS policy of supporting "patriotic" European parties)

Unfortunately, the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) i.e. how much major banks charged each other for short-term loans, became a meaningless measure of wholesale funding stress because (a) banks simply stopped lending and (b) it was rigged to give the impression of normalcy.

* And then there was RBS. All of the above applies, but it, like HBoS, also engaged in other forms of dumb lending including LBOs and "shit" (ship) finance, as well as actual sub-prime lending. Finally, it pissed an actual >£40bn cash up a wall buying ABN AMRO during a liquidity crisis.

5/5 The broader lessons then concern risk appetite, funding, business models and credit quality (besides sector exposure), and the caliber and scope of bank regulators. For example, in the UK a Prudential Regulation Authority was established in 2013 and wholesale funding cut to 10% by 2016.

4/5 Observing this was a toothless regulator lacking explicit prudential authority, but with a box ticking mindset and staff who, when they weren’t distracted by bank capital accords, were applying for better paid jobs advising banks on how to keep the regulator off their backs.

3/5 which averaged 25% of total bank funding in 2006. Outliers here included Northern Rock (75%) and HBoS (50%), indeed, when wholesale markets froze following the Bear Stearns collapse. the wholesale funding % became a predictor of which would be the next British bank to fail/be taken over.

2/5 business model of rapid growth via increasingly dumb property lending. Britain avoided NINJA loans, but did see the 125% mortgage and banks treating clapped out nursing homes like they were prime London offices. To finance this banks made extensive use of (very) short term wholesale funding,

They don't?

Thank you for posting. And aye, for all troll's exploit civility/diplomatic norms, it's only deniable when the subject of the trolling allows it to be so, which in turn highlights the centrality of power (which I think deserved more attention) e.g. Putin trolls you, you don't get to troll Putin.

Lovely description of the original Brexiteers, but I'd suggest delusions of empire have largely given way to a Right that slavishly cuts and pastes whatever gets clicks in America into our politics.

Trolling certainly is key, one of its functions being to let critics/observers/elected European officials delude themselves into dismissing what's being said and done.

It's not trolling. It provides reasonable descriptions of US policy and thinking. The "surprise" arises from the tendency to hear what we want to hear, not what the American Right is actually saying and doing (the mainstream American Right itself being "Far Right").

2/2 here's the document (and/or you could read the JD Vance Munich speech, attend a CPAC Hungary etc. to get a sense of the consistency and seriousness of these clowns)

Relates to the c.200 petrol ("gas") stations Lukoil operates in the US. So not nothing (total t/o p.a. comfortably 9 figures), but not sure it'll affect Russian oil prices. And as ever it's the US going easy on Russia.

Its open to interpretation

cheers

4/4 Finally, in an economy with full employment where every month 1000s of Russians receive a sign-on bonus big enough to put down a deposit on a flat in say Krasnodar, the number of new mortgages taken out in 2025 is barely half the pre-invasion totals seen in 2020 and 2021.

3/4 And while the margin between market and subsidised rates has shrunk, the upward trend in the total value of new subsidised lending, means the additional cost of new, subsidised mortgages was higher in November than at the start of the year.

2/4 recovery in private demand, which reached 24% of all new mortgages by value in November (an IT workers’ subsidy ending this year may be a factor here). More borrowing at market rates in turn means the average rate paid by borrowers continues to increase even as rates themselves decline.