re: #75 goddamnedfrank

Good article in Forbes on Putin’s Ukraine gambit and the Malaysian Air shootdown.

This paragraph:

Finally, the price of oil is much more likely to go down than in the next few years. Barron’s recently predicted that it will reach as low as $75, down from it’s current price of just under $110 in the near to medium term. That, along with the sanctions, will devastate the Russian economy and significantly curtail Putin’s capacity to act.

from the Forbes article caught my eye; Russia’s budget is pretty much predicated on the idea that oil will remain in the $100 to $120 p/bbl range. If it fell to $75 p/bbl, as Barron’s has predicted, Russia’s gonna be in a lot of economic trouble at that point, much as what happened in the run-up to the collapse of the USSR.

What goes around comes around.

Here’s the Barron’s article, btw: online.barrons.com