The Compound and Friends - Ian Bremmer on What Investors Should Know About Ukraine and Russia

Episode Date: February 28, 2022

On this special podcast episode, Ian Bremmer, President of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media, joins Josh Brown, Michael Batnick, and Ben Carlson to discuss how Russia's invasion of Ukraine could impact markets and the world economy. (Recorded live on 2/28/22) Preorder Ian's book, The Power of Crisis: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Power-of-Crisis/Ian-Bremmer/9781982167509 Check out The Compound shop: https://idontshop.com Follow The Compound on Instagram: https://instagram.com/thecompoundnews Follow The Compound on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thecompoundnews Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. See our disclosures here: https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Okay, I'm not sure if we succeeded if we're actually live this time. This is Josh Brown here with The Compound, and I want to welcome everybody to a special edition. We've got Ian Bremmer here. Ian is the president of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media. We've got Ian for a relatively short amount of time, but we want to get to a lot of questions. He is an expert on everything going on in Eastern Europe and with Ukraine and Russia. Ian, the first thing I wanted to ask you, and I think this is probably on everyone's mind, is related to whether or not the sanctions will have the intended effect. is related to whether or not the sanctions will have the intended effect. According to the American Enterprise Institute,

Putin has been planning for this moment, financially planning, since 2014. It's said that he's built up about $630 billion of international reserves, equivalent to a third of the Russian economy. He's also reduced Russia's public debt level to less than 20% of GDP. Has he done enough so that the sanctions will not have the desired effect or will Russia still be susceptible to what we're trying to do as an international community? Well, Josh, first, great to be with you. And let me respond to your question with a question. When you say desired effect, what do you mean? I suppose the desired effect might be to bring him to the negotiating table,

as opposed to having the violence continue uninterrupted. Yeah. So I think the answer to that is no. But I think the answer to that is no, kind of irrespective of how big the sanctions are, right? And that's part of the problem here. I mean, Putin understands that Ukraine is much more important to him than it is to the United States. And that's one of the reasons why the U.S. and President Biden not only said that NATO would not defend Ukraine directly, wouldn't send troops on the ground, we even said we wouldn't send troops to evacuate Americans from the embassy if it was necessary, because we didn't want to potentially be at risk of directly fighting Russia. Now, we are putting very significant sanctions on Russia, and these sanctions are, in my view, dramatically greater than what Putin himself would have

expected. Because let's face it, I mean, 2008, he hits Georgia, he takes a piece. Sanctions are pretty limited. 2014, he hits Ukraine, takes two pieces. And a few years later, he's hosting the World Cup, and you've got European heads of state that are coming to visit him there. And 2016, he messes with our elections. We don't do anything. Obama's like, I don't want to deal with that right now. elections, we don't do anything. Obama's like, I don't want to deal with that right now. And so there were good reasons to believe, if you were Putin, that in 2022, facing Biden, post-Afghanistan, wanting to pivot to Asia, post-Merkel in Georgia, Macron with his own ideas of strategic autonomy in Europe, there were reasons why Putin would believe that there would not be

a strong and unified response from the United States and Europe. He vastly miscalculated. So Josh, there is an intended response of the sanctions. That intended response is that NATO and the EU are much stronger coming out of this crisis than they were going in. That Germany is now, I mean, how many presidents, Bush, Obama, Trump, were like pushing, pushing, pushing on the Germans. You're not spending enough on defense. They're committed to over 2% now. They want to put it in

their constitution. And further, they're going to send direct weapons systems to Ukraine. They're taking the lead in driving hard sanctions, including SWIFT. The Americans had to pull the Germans back this weekend because the Americans were saying, wait a second, we want to have some level of optionality here. You don't want to kill all of SWIFT because you'll force the Russians into the Chinese financial transaction system. That isn't good for us. And you don't want to end the ability to pay for Russian gas. But I mean, the fact is that the Europeans are every much leading the sanctions response with the Americans. It's not like the United States are leading the Europeans and

they're kicking and screaming. So that I think is a big deal. But Putin himself, I think is unfortunately fairly locked in right now. He has well over 100,000 troops on the ground inside Ukraine. He has already taken significant territory, particularly in the south. He is heading towards Kiev. It's true that he has not taken Kiev yet, but he's also so far avoided civilian casualties. I fear that is not likely to last for long. And this is an incredibly dangerous situation. Ben, go ahead.

Ian, if these sanctions do somehow destroy, more or less destroy the Russian economy, how do we even begin to understand the unintended consequences of that from the financial system to politically? Like, what does that even mean? And how are people even prepared for this? We should think about this in the way that we thought about Iran, right? In the sense that the purpose of the Iranian sanctions were twofold. It was first to drive the Iranians to their knees, to force them to capitulate to our preferred negotiation outcome of the JCPOA, the nuclear deal. And secondly, barring that, it was to put so much pressure on the Iranian regime that it starts to erode, that maybe that could create the conditions for regime change. Now, we're not going to say that

about Russia, because Russia is a military superpower superpower and they've got 5,000 nuclear weapons. But that is what we're doing. So, I mean, I think we have to understand that we are at war with Russia right now. Like this is the we call it the nuclear option. That's the other N word that we really don't like to say. Right. We we are putting massive economic sanctions on Russia. It is intended to cripple them. At a minimum, we're talking about 3% to 5% GDP contraction on top of the already significant economic underperformance that they had from the 2014 sanctions.

the 2014 sanctions. And that assumes that the Russians do nothing in response, which I would not assume at all in terms of cyber, in terms of pipelines getting blown up in service of war, these kinds of things. Ian, Forbes is reporting that, this is before today with another crash in the Russian ruble and stock market. Forbes was reporting that Russia's oligarchs and billionaires have already lost a combined $126 billion, including almost $40 billion the day of the invasion. Their stock market has now been more than cut in half year to date. UBS and other large banks have cut the margin loan value of Russian bonds to zero.

We know mass liquidations are coming. Can this get to a point where Putin becomes vulnerable in country? Or is he so frightening to the oligarch class that that should not be something that we think is possible? So I think that to answer, the answer to that question is, of course,

this is the greatest pressure that Putin will have felt on his regime since he's become president. So, I mean, if there is the danger of a palace coup, it exists now. I don't think we're there yet, but we can clearly get there. As of this morning, Josh, 6,000 Russian citizens have been detained in nonviolent protests against the war. But that's well before you get massive economic hardship. That's just on the back of war opposition. So I think the idea that that could become 10x, 20x, 100x of what it is right now, and you could see mass Russian demonstrations in Moscow around the Kremlin seat of power that required violent suppression. And then you start to see Russians against the war

getting killed by those that are supported by Putin. Not to mention the fact that as Ukrainian civilians get killed again, less than fewer than a thousand Ukrainians have died so far. It's horrifying to say that in a way that seems like it's small. But the reality is that given Russian firepower, that's a very small number with a couple hundred thousand troops surrounding Ukraine. Those numbers, in order to take Kiev, those numbers are going to go way up. The Ukrainians and the Russians are seen kind of by many as one nation. And I mean, everyone in the Russian structure of power has friends and many have relatives in Ukraine. Is that what's behind the restraint? Or is it

about Russia standing on the world stage? No. Which is keeping them from really killing a lot of people. It's domestic opposition. Killing a whole bunch of Ukrainians will meet strong opposition internally, including within Putin's inner circle, including someone like Roman Abramovich, who always has said Lviv in Western Ukraine is his favorite town. He's got Ukrainian relatives. So there's a lot of that. And look, so I think that if you were to get that kind of demonstration and revolt internally,

that would put a lot of pressure on the inner circle. If you were to get large numbers of Russian soldiers laying down their weapons because they're unwilling to fire on Ukrainian citizens, unarmed Ukrainian citizens, if you were to see bomber pilots that were to say, you know, what happens if they say, I'm not doing this, and instead they decide to defect. I mean, there's a lot of ways that Russian demoralization of the military, who are not the best trained and not the best armed, could potentially, as you start talking about tens of thousands of Ukrainian casualties, this is not a war in Chechnya. This is not a war in Afghanistan. This is a war against fellow Ukrainians, that's fellow Slavs, who are – that would cause a problem. And then there's the question of whether some of the internal oligarchs – and of course, all of their money has come to them because of Putin. So those that have said anything publicly have been very cautious about what they've said. But they might put more pressure on them. So that's an absolute possibility, Josh. There's a land war, an air war, and now it sounds like there's a financial war as well brewing. Russia is, according to the World Bank, the 11th largest economy in the world.

Is Russia too big to fail? What happens with the ripple effects, with the energy and global GDP and all these sort of interrelated things. Yeah. I mean, you note that the swift sanctions exclude the ability to pay for gas transit, oil transit, because that's obviously very important to the European economy. Now, would the Russians be willing to cut off their nose despite their face and cut off that energy transit? It's certainly plausible. Would they use their cyber capabilities against European, against American markets, and cause very major damage, critical infrastructure? I mean, the fact is that the interconnectedness of the Russians to the global economy,

as well as the offensive capabilities they have, which go well beyond military capabilities, I'm talking cyber, but also disinformation, these are things that will have knock-on economic impact. I'm talking cyber, but also disinformation. These are things that will have knock on economic impacts. I think the markets have been far too sanguine about the impact of a major confrontation with Russia so far. And I think that as of this morning, that continues to be the case. The NASDAQ just went green, by the way, to your point. So Ian, what is the range of outcomes here? Has it just gotten wider by the day, basically? by the way, to your point. So Ian, what's like, what is the range of outcomes here? Is it just gotten wider by the day, basically? Well, I look there, I guess it's possible that you could see a negotiated settlement, but I have a hard time imagining. I think the reason that

there are negotiations happening right now on the border in Belarus is because the Chinese want them and the Russians feel like they need to say that we gave it a shot, especially if they're planning on escalating against Ukrainian civilians. They want to say that we tried to negotiate. Is the nightmare scenario that China and Russia become closer together as a result of this? Is China hanging back, waiting to see who might win before they fully commit to picking a side? How should we what should we make of that? The nightmare scenario is this war expands in Ukraine significantly. Western civilians and fighters that join as volunteers get killed.

The Russians are they further all of their DEFCON alerts. You have an accident, an air incident, a naval incident in the Black Sea, and suddenly there's a fight with a NATO country. threatened internally that he feels the need to provoke in such a way. A nightmare scenario is a false flag incident that kills a large number of Russians on the ground in Donetsk that, you know, who knows, a dirty bomb, for example. People have talked about that. That then provides justification for the Russians to do, you know, sort of a massive. What probability would you assign to something like that? Look, what I'm saying is these are not thin tail risks. This is not 1%. I mean, is it 5?

Is it 20? I don't know. But it's within the realm of possibility. I mean, it's when you are talking about, I want to be clear here. The West, we may not want to think we're at war with Russia. And we don't have soldiers that are shooting at Russians. But we're at war with Russia and we don't have soldiers that are shooting at Russians, but we are at war with Russia right now. We're doing everything we can to truly undermine Putin, to stop him, to humiliate him, to undermine him. And there

are very good reasons for us to do that, but it's a very dangerous thing to do. So there are risks that come with that. I mean, we can't you can't just be in a position where all you're thinking about is what he did is unacceptable. And so therefore, we have to respond with maximum force. I understand the emotional impulse that's behind that. But you have to think about the implications of doing that against Russia. See, when we do that against Iran or some other rogue, you remember with Soleimani, right? I mean, they were poking us. They were poking us. They were poking us. We weren't doing anything.

And they were hitting American bases. And they were blowing up our allies in Yemen. And then they put drones against the largest refinery in the world, the massive plant the Saudis had. And they blew it up. Right. And they could have done more damage to it. But to show they had the capacity, we still didn't do anything. And we warned them. We said, don't keep doing this. And then they went and they hit one more American base. And we said, you know what? We're going to kill Soleimani. We're just going to kill the head of your all of your military forces. And then everyone said oh my

god world war three and my view then was guys guys it's iran like they had been led to believe that there were no consequences i'm asking acting like a bunch of thugs they have now seen there is a massive consequence and they will back down now it is possible that Russia is like that proverbial bully. You hit him in the face and he goes home crying. It's possible. But he has 5,000 nukes. What do you tell – I'm just saying that you cannot simply believe that the Russian outcome goes the way the Iranian outcome does.

What do you tell people about the ramifications for this on commodity prices and central bank activity? It's been said that there's about $23 billion worth of Bitcoin in Russian wallets. I'm sure that number is low, and there's probably a lot that's unreported. Is the Russian government, for example, planning to make crypto part of their strategy to evade sanctions? Will that be meaningful to the world economy? And what do you think this does to the Federal Reserve's ideas about trying to stave off inflation? Does this put them on hold? I'm not an economist, right? So I'm not, I'm not, I'm fundamentally someone who understands

international relations and geopolitics. So I'm fundamentally someone who understands international relations and geopolitics. So I'm not going to be the person that can give you the Larry Summers answer on that or the equivalent on the other side of the aisle. What I can say is that clearly, there are geopolitical implications that will unanchor your inflation expectations. What is clear is that your belief for where energy prices are going when suddenly most of the energy pipeline infrastructure that goes into Europe from Russia goes through Ukraine should have a very significant discount attached to it. And not just that. I mean, what about all of the food and metals and the rest that comes out of Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea, which you fundamentally can't operate it right now? I don't know when you can. So that's a big question, too. We're seeing the ruble absolutely get cremated. Have we ever seen an example of a country going through massive inflation in such a short period of time without it fully destabilizing the entire regime?

without it fully destabilizing the entire regime? Not that I can, not recently. Not that I can think of, right? I mean, when I look at those sorts of moves, usually it's accompanied with a financial collapse. So it's hard to imagine the Russians are going to avoid that. How is it possible to move forward with him as president still, no matter what the outcome is here?

That's the problem. I mean, in other words, now that you've gotten to the point of no return, I mean, I just had a major European ambassador to the U.S. in my house right before I'm talking to you guys. I don't want to say which one it is to break the confidence who basically said, look, we've passed the point of no return. We cannot rebuild our relations with Russia. They're broken. I mean, short of Putin being forced out of office. they're broken. I mean, short of Putin being forced out of office. And I mean, the Germans completely understand, for example, that their pipeline, their strategy and being dependent on Russia was a mistake, a strategic mistake. They're going to, they'll never do that again. I think the Brits will never be the conduit for Russian wealth, oligarch wealth, the way they

have been for the past 20 years. I think these things are over. I mean, they may not be over 100%, but they're fundamentally over in the way that the old normal used to be. So how do you work with Putin? And the answer is, I think we're in a new Cold War. I don't think you can work with Putin. So is there a potential silver lining outcome where obviously there's going to be atrocities and horrors in between now and then, but in the future, relations look different and maybe a little bit better? And Ian, we're going to, we're going to let this be the last question because your people wanted you off at 10 50. So, so we'll, I've been, I got a thing at 11, but we can do like, Oh, okay, great. Okay. We'd love to keep you. So please, Michael's question. What, what, what could be the silver lining here? The silver lining, there's no silver lining for the Ukrainians.

The silver lining, let's be clear, and that's really important because, I mean, they did nothing other than want to be independent and democratic. And for that, they're facing the loss of tens of thousands of lives and already 500,000 refugees have left the country and there'll be millions. So I don't think we can, you can't answer that question without first taking a breath and recognizing that there is no silver lining. But for the West, the fact that we are taking seriously that you have to fight for democracy, that you actually need to pay for defense, that it's a priority, and that we need to work together. It's like a wake-up call. Europeans don't see eye to eye. But the fact is that, I mean, the speech that was given by

Olaf Scholz yesterday was a speech that was unimaginable after the wall came down. He just gave it. And I think it matters a lot for the world community that people that run advanced industrial democracies are prepared to work together and actually spend on that. They have to. Are you surprised by the degree of resistance that the Ukrainian citizens, school teachers, shopkeepers seem to be putting up? And is that in part what's inspiring the NATO countries and the Europeans to act even more boldly than Putin might have thought they would? I think it's helped that Zelensky is seen as a folk hero now. I think social media, they've played well. I was a little surprised the Russians didn't hit the Ukrainians with major cyber attacks

because they're allowing, if you shut down the entire internet in Ukraine, it's a lot harder to get that news out. And they're just more effective. And Putin looks old. He looks a little confused. He looks angry. The Ukrainian president is someone that, I i mean whether you like him or not and by the way before this attack he wasn't very popular among most western leaders but the fact

is that he's seen as an enormously young charismatic vibrant figure courageous staying in kiev and fighting for his nation so he's the underdog that everybody's rooting for and i think that does make a difference it also matters that putin lied to the face of every russian leader he talked to for the last several weeks. And I think they're angry about that. I think Macron feels like he was played. He was made him to look like a fool in his election cycle. He goes out, he talks to Putin. Five hours later, Putin said, who's this guy? You know, I think I think Schultz is angry that Putin said they'll never be in a vision. We're pulling troops out of Belarus while more troops

were going in. I think these are leaders that aren't used to being lied to directly like that. One of the things that you hear all weekend, yeah, one of the things you hear all weekend is Putin can take Ukraine, but can Russia really hold it? So what is an occupied, let's not assume this, but hypothetically, if they do manage to take Kyiv, topple the government and assume control of the country, then what? You know, it costs a shitload. They've got a government in exile that's providing all this military support to partisans fighting on the ground. The Ukrainians freaking hate them. They've basically destroyed the Ukrainian economy. Russia's in trouble too. There is no, when you ask

silver linings, people are not paying attention to the knock-on effects of how bad this is going to be. That is what I'm going to say. Well, Ian, we really appreciate your time, and we're going to stick around. We're going to let you go, and we'll tell everybody about your new book coming out, and we'll make sure there are links to that. Thank you so much for coming through today. We really appreciate your help in understanding this. your help in understanding this. Okay, guys, that was Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group. And you can follow Ian. I think we have some of his handles here. He's at Ian Bremmer on Twitter, at Eurasia Group, and at GZERO Media, which is where he puts out a lot of videos. And the book

we're referencing is The Power of Crisis, which is going to come out on May of videos. And the book we're referencing is The Power of Crisis, which is going to come out on May 17th. And I think we've got links below. Ben, what was your biggest takeaway from what we learned from Ian just now? This is depressing, I guess. Yeah, I was going to say that. I don't see so much has been happening.

I don't see, like, I do think all the Europe coming together and having all this long-term stuff is going to be great. But like the whole knock-on effects of what's been going on and what's happening, and it's all happening so quick. I don't think we've all had time to like wrap our heads around like what this is and how devastating this is going to be for whole countries and like what the second-order effects are for other people too. whole countries and like what the second order effects are for other people too. I think the European Union is estimating they could see as many as 5 million refugees cross the border from Ukraine into their countries. I would assume mostly Poland or at least Poland bearing the brunt of that. I know we're sending aid. I know everybody's sending aid from around the world. I have no idea what something like that might cost or how long it could go on for, but they are talking about allowing refugees to be

in EU countries for up to three years, which tells you the mindset of European politicians right now and the expectations about what this can entail. Michael, what was your big takeaway from what Ian told us? Yeah, more of the same with what you guys entail. Michael, what was your big takeaway from what Ian told us? Yeah, more of the same with what you guys are saying. It is scary. I was listening to Derek Thompson over the weekend. He was on his podcast, Plain English, with a professor of Chicago called Professor Paul Post.

And one of the things that they mentioned was people on social media are up in arms about the sanctions. Why aren't we going stronger? Why aren't we being more tough on the sanctions? And one of the things that he said that's so frightening is that you don't really ideally want to back Putin into a corner and make him feel like a caged animal with nothing to lose. And he just has his back against the wall and it goes completely unhinged. So I think, unfortunately, it looks like we're getting to that point. Ian mentioned what Putin

looks like. And I don't study Putin's facial language but just looking at him on TV, like he looks like shit and that's where it gets scary when he gets unhinged. It doesn't seem like there's a good outcome from any of this that like – that you can thread the needle and say, OK, this worked out the best of all – like there is no path for that. It doesn't feel like at least. Well, if you believe what Ian says, which is that we're past the point of no return and there's not going to be any settlement that's like serious or not even talks that are meaningful, then it's hard to see how we don't get to the point where we start referring to this as – I hate the term World War III because it's so hyperbolic.

But according to Ian, we're like kind of there already. Do you guys think this is like, how much higher is the probability for some sort of crazy financial crisis either now or like a few years down the line from what we do because of this? It has to be higher than it was last week. We have some, what is this table that we have? Consolidated positions on residents of Russia. Did we, did we, so what does this mean? residents of Russia? What does this mean? Mark Rubenstein tweeted this over the weekend. And he said that these are basically loans outstanding to Russian entities. French banks have $25 billion worth of exposure. So actually, we have a chart looking at, like Mark gave this to me, breaking down the specific banks. And relatively speaking, it's small.

Obviously, you don't know where the bodies are buried or maybe where there might be leverage and knock-on effects and all sorts of things that can come untangled. But I guess to bring this back to the market, it's interesting to me that the NASDAQ is going green again. We had these really... Show up this chart from Bespoke, guys, please please showing what happened the morning of the invasion. And then what happened at the close as a Friday, uh, John, we got this chart. So what we're seeing now is just a big reversal off the lows. Maybe we don't got this chart. Oh, there we go. So this was at the open on Thursday on the left. Um, and then since the open on the right, look at arc off the lows, nice, like off the lows. And we're going up further still off the lows. I think, chart off please, if I had to speculate into what's going on, I think a lot

of this is probably the idea of a 50 basis point rate hike in March, just completely off the table at this point. I want to go back to what Ian said though, about something occurring in the Black Sea. If there's some sort of major thing that takes place that is beyond just what we've seen so far, we really don't know how quickly our markets will reprice and react to that. But what we do know is our markets seem to be pricing events in the blink of an eye these days. So I don't think that will be gradual, right? And I think investors have to get accustomed to that. And maybe they have. Maybe that explains all of the options trading and the rapidity with which people are getting

bullish, then getting bearish again. Maybe it's because active market participants are just OK with this new world right now. They have no choice. I did a post this weekend where I kind of put together some research I've done in the past on how counterintuitive the stock market is with war. But I think Josh, your point about markets moving faster than ever these days, like you didn't have all the technology and the algorithms and stuff back then. So like I showed like world war two was like the worst year for the war was basically like

1942 in like Germany and Japan, like had everyone on the run. And that's when the stock market bottomed. But you're right. Like how fast things are happening these days, I think the prospect for a flash crash is higher than ever these days. Some bad piece of news comes out, and you could have just this huge air pocket in the markets.

Josh, what do we say from Civita in terms of U.S. companies' exposure to Russia in terms of the number of sales? It's effectively zero. Civita, Suburbananian at Bank of America calculated that if you took, uh, the S&P 500's revenues, you would find that 0.1% or effectively zero comes from sales to Russia, uh, or Russian customers or whatever. So it's, that's not, I think that's not the thing. I think it's, I think it's bank exposure. And then I think it's, you know, we don't know what energy.

A hundred percent. And one of the interesting things that I think we're going to learn this week is what do multinationals do? Because they all have ties to Russia or Russian entities. So we saw over the weekend, British Petroleum or BP be willing to announce that they are going to sell their 19% stake in Rosneft, which is a big Russian oil and gas concern. They were making 2.4 billion in annual profit from that investment. And I don't know who's buying it.

So let's assume they're going to lose money when they try to sell that as immediately as they say they will. Is that the start of a wave of divestment? We're also hearing this is Norges Bank. Right. So Norway's investment management, which is their sovereign wealth fund,

are going to unwind its existing $3 billion worth of Russian holdings. That's what you're seeing in the Russian stock market. It's people either front-running that or the actual liquidations taking place prior to announcements. The Russian market is closed today. They actually put out an announcement that they're not going to allow foreigners to sell their stocks. Wouldn't it make sense for them to close for like a month like we did in World War I or however long that was? What's the point of them opening their market at all at this point? I think that's 100% right. And it's interesting to see the risk being priced in the ETFs, right? We've got two big ones from VanEck and iShares that are, well, the VanEck one, for example, is down 24.8% today. I assume iShares is the same.

Economically, don't you think that this also heightens the risk of extended inflation for much longer than people would have thought? Like it has to be higher. It's hard to imagine this not having consequences that might or might not impact the stock market. You would think, how could it be immune forever? But there are going to be economic ramifications from this. I think the inflation picture in Europe is more dramatically affected structurally than the inflation picture. We already have inflation. The question is like, what will the energy component mean for future inflation? And I think it's hard to get around the fact that it's going to be worse for Europe than for us.

We're actually a net exporter. We've been a net exporter since 2019. Every year for the last 10 years, we've had less and less imports of energy products coming in. So one good thing about ultra low interest rates from the Fed since the financial crisis is that it's funded a whole hell of a lot of development of natural resource capabilities here in the U.S. And so I think Europe's got a bigger problem. Is there anything else that we want to get to before we wrap up? And again, if you're joining us late, by all means, go back and make sure to watch the beginning when we had Ian Bremmer during the live stream. So do we want to do

this chart gdp per capita germany what is this maybe some maybe some long term this is this isn't always kind of was crazy to me so this is germany after their economy just got smoked in world war one they had hyperinflation following that and then world war ii their economy just got decimated all the sanctions they had by, they were already back on trend and actually above trend after that. That's amazing how much damage for how many decades and how quickly it got back on trend. Yeah. So I guess trying to look at the long-term sort of thing, I guess my whole thing for the past week has been equal parts like terrifying, but also inspiring. Like the Ukrainian people are just giant badasses. That's like my biggest takeaway, I think, from the last few days. I can't believe some of the stories that I'm reading and some of the interviews of just regular people and what they've chosen to do.

It's really remarkable. And maybe that's a good place to leave things. Obviously, we do this for informational purposes. We do not have any edge on what might be the next shoe to drop or what may happen with the war or with diplomacy. But hopefully today's live stream, we got to a lot of questions that you yourself had. And hopefully this has been helpful. And if it has been, make sure to like the channel, make sure to leave that in the comments,

and we'll try to do more of this sort of thing going forward. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in we appreciate it new What Are Your Thoughts tomorrow night at 5.30 and there's a new Animal Spirits out today guys yep and a new one Wednesday alright go check out the Animal Spirits pod today new one Wednesday

we'll see you guys soon this podcast is for informational purposes only Bye, guys. See you guys soon.