Russian Economy General News: #3

Q&A: Collapsing Oil Prices, Tumbling Ruble and Downgrade

http://russia-insider.com/en/2015/01/28/2861

what does this mean

S&P predicts that Russia’s reserves will fall to just three months of current account payments by 2017, down from seven months last year.

This is the same organization that gave Lehman Brothers aaa credit before defaulting. Their opinions are worth about as much as a square of toilet paper.

I dont know if people can get this through their heads but Russia cannot gain western credit anymore. There has not been a single transaction of long term loan from western bank to Russia. So none of this actually matters. Heck, they cant even collect the money if Russia refuses to pay. No loss for Russia as now their credit rating is junk status. No loss because they cant even acquire a new loan. All of this is a bunch of tools who are talking to justify their positions and are in trouble cause they dont know what to do. But western credit to Russia is a newer concept and well, now they dont have it thanks to sanctions. The bankers/ creditors are sweating cause they know that they will be thrown under the bus like in Iceland, and a lot of people will lose billions, but it did wonders for Iceland and they refused to pay back debt.

This article also goes contrary what CBR has been saying and what government has been doing. Russian gov stated a bank will be created to facilitate bad credit meaning they take the debt and bad assets, as well, S&P, moodys and Fitch were banned in Russia.

http://itar-tass.com/en/economy/774076

Oh look, Lukashenko threatening to leave EEU if they dont get their way, then says trade with west is larger than trade with Russia.
Seriously, Baka is a thorn in the ass.

That said, he is saying they will try to integrate further in EEU.

sepheronx wrote:
Seriously, Baka is a thorn in the ass.

nice pun.

collegeboy16 wrote:

sepheronx wrote:
Seriously, Baka is a thorn in the ass.

nice pun.

No pun intended.

From what I can read/find, Russia is Belarus largrst importer and exporter. When he says his largest trade is the west, he is accumulating multiple countries vs 1 and if you break it down per country, Russia is still Belarus' largest..... so he is trying to use empty threats.

Russia Considers Creation of "Bad Bank" to Buy Troubled Assets

Nothing really in the article that the title doesnt state. Financial Times is usually spouting BS, but at least they are mentioning this bank.

Nice

Russia Drafts New 2015 Macroeconomic Forecast on $50 Oil Price

Rusija postaje druga zemlja u proizvodnje zlata u svijetu

Bank "Russia" started testing processing through NBTS

Ulyukayev considers it possible to gradually increase the retirement age

I don't know why the Rouble is falling again, I thought Russia had bought most it's oil stocks back and it would help.

http://inserbia.info/today/2014/12/grandmaster-putin-russia-earns-20-bln-recovers-stocks-of-its-companies/


An old article but a good one.


http://www.globalresearch.ca/financial-warfare-the-anglo-american-caliphate-confronts-brics/5400805

Ruble falling and them owning their oil stocks are two different things. Value of Ruble to USD is down due to talks of new sanctions and S&P lowering Russias credit to junk status. It is pure speculative attacks. Has no effect on domestic made only for greedy oligarches. In 1920-30 ruble dropped as low as a million rubles to USD. So this is pointless.

par far wrote:I don't know why the Rouble is falling again, I thought Russia had bought most it's oil stocks back and it would help.

http://inserbia.info/today/2014/12/grandmaster-putin-russia-earns-20-bln-recovers-stocks-of-its-companies/


An old article but a good one.


http://www.globalresearch.ca/financial-warfare-the-anglo-american-caliphate-confronts-brics/5400805

The exchange rate of the ruble is determined by a herd of lemmings and their manipulators. The notion is that Russia
is a one-commodity banana republic. BTW, Canada's exchange rate is falling fast too, it is under 80 US cents to the
Canadian dollar now and was over 110 US cents to the Canadian dollar several years ago. Even though supposedly
only 3% of Canada's GDP depends on oil, the "market" (of mostly idiots) is penalizing the Canadian dollar. In the case
of Russia the hysteria is amplified so the valuation change is much higher.

It is the FED in NY who controlls the ratings of exchange between dollar and other currencies, because it is the FED that is the head above Bretton Woods treaty which most countries are bound to.

This talks and rating agencies are only there to announce it to the public that this or that is "lowered", the actual adjustment of exchange currencies are done by FED head of all US dollar banks.

A bit off topic.

After a bit of searching i was actually able to find Russia's Amazon, called Ulmart.
http://www.ulmart.ru/

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%DE%EB%EC%E0%F0%F2

Problem was the site is completely Russian, so i couldn't navigate properly, obviously this was veered mostly towards the domestic market, that said i really wished i could've checked if i could get an Elbrus Laptop/Rig sent my way, pity.

P.S: Apologies to sepheronx, i guess.

AlfaT8 wrote:A bit off topic.

After a bit of searching i was actually able to find Russia's Amazon, called Ulmart.
http://www.ulmart.ru/

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%DE%EB%EC%E0%F0%F2

Problem was the site is completely Russian, so i couldn't navigate properly, obviously this was veered mostly towards the domestic market, that said i really wished i could've checked if i could get an Elbrus Laptop/Rig sent my way, pity.

P.S: Apologies to sepheronx, i guess.

They only sell foreign brands or systems based on Intel or AMD.

AlfaT8 wrote:A bit off topic.

After a bit of searching i was actually able to find Russia's Amazon, called Ulmart.
http://www.ulmart.ru/

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%DE%EB%EC%E0%F0%F2

Problem was the site is completely Russian, so i couldn't navigate properly, obviously this was veered mostly towards the domestic market, that said i really wished i could've checked if i could get an Elbrus Laptop/Rig sent my way, pity.

P.S: Apologies to sepheronx, i guess.

Only company selling (prototype ATM) is a kraftway monoblock or all in one with the Elbrus 2C+. This is a test system to show it can work under civil use as well. You won't see Elbrus processors for civil market for a while, and you may only be able to pick up end systems with the Elbrus 2SM (which will be manufactured in domestic fab). None of MCST processors are ready for civil market and all of the end systems are only available to various industries and institutions. The 360TB NAS system I mentioned that will use the Elbrus CPU was mentioned to be geared towards the military, and certain institutions. Even current available CPUs derived off of the SPARC v9 are only available to these same groups. My understanding is that MCST wants to get into the civil market through Kraftway (as they make custom motherboards already) but the CPU 2c+ and 4c are funded and owned by ministry of industry and trade. Elbrus 8C, 2SM, S and possibly upcoming APU will be for civil market. No word yet though.

Tl;Dr - No Elbrus CPU on civil market ATM and all available ones for ministries and military.

Best you can do is try to contact MCST to get an engineering sample.... All of them are soldered onto the PCBs as well.

sepheronx wrote:
Tl;Dr - No Elbrus CPU on civil market ATM and all available ones for ministries and military.

Best you can do is try to contact MCST to get an engineering sample.... All of them are soldered onto the PCBs as well.

Damn it, at this rate i'll be cold, dead and buried, by the time they get them into the civil market.

kvs wrote:
They only sell foreign brands or systems based on Intel or AMD.

FFS, are you telling me there are no Russian made products available on Russia's own e-retail site??

AlfaT8 wrote:

sepheronx wrote:
Tl;Dr - No Elbrus CPU on civil market ATM and all available ones for ministries and military.

Best you can do is try to contact MCST to get an engineering sample.... All of them are soldered onto the PCBs as well.

Damn it, at this rate i'll be cold, dead and buried, by the time they get them into the civil market.

kvs wrote:
They only sell foreign brands or systems based on Intel or AMD.

FFS, are you telling me there are no Russian made products available on Russia's own e-retail site??

All he said was about computers. Not other products.  If you want a Russian computer, why not purchase a kraftway then? http://kraftway.ru/

If you want one using an ARM processor, I already linked you to Module, whom makes their own that you can order from.  For 3280 Rubles + VAT.

sepheronx wrote:
All he said was about computers.  Not other products.  If you want a Russian computer, why not purchase a kraftway then? http://kraftway.ru/

If you want one using an ARM processor, I already linked you to Module, whom makes their own that you can order from.  For 3280 Rubles + VAT.

That's good to hear, got worried a minute there, hope Ulmart gets some english translations.

As for kraftway, to tedious, first of i am not sure that kraftway will take me seriously and second i am afraid i might get placed on the U.S Terrorist Watchlist/No fly-list.

and as for Module, i was just interested in checking if Russia had some sort of analog to the Rass.Pi.

All that said, great motherboard, didn't know they also work with Nvidia and AMD graphics.

Funny thing about server vendors, their markups are so huge that the ruble FX change can be swallowed with little price change.
I have put together quad socket Opteron 6100 and 6200 systems for work before and was shocked by the prices that Dell and HP
charged for nearly identical systems. They were over three times more expensive.

These days the motherboards are all made in China. The days of Taiwan being the source are long gone. So Russian companies
can source most of the components for low prices from China. The "pain" is in sourcing Intel or AMD server processors. But I
think that if NATO tries to play hardball and impose import restrictions on Russia they will get a surprise. Both China and Russia
will collaborate to introduce a generic RISC CPU to replace both Intel and AMD. The Elbrus is like some ivory tower research
project. It is wonderful they got VLIW to actually work (Intel failed with Itanium) but they need a Plan B. Making an Opteron/Xeon
clone would be worthwhile and they would not be starting from scratch.

kvs wrote:Funny thing about server vendors, their markups are so huge that the ruble FX change can be swallowed with little price change.
I have put together quad socket Opteron 6100 and 6200 systems for work before and was shocked by the prices that Dell and HP
charged for nearly identical systems.  They were over three times more expensive.

These days the motherboards are all made in China.   The days of Taiwan being the source are long gone.   So Russian companies
can source most of the components for low prices from China.   The "pain" is in sourcing Intel or AMD server processors.   But I
think that if NATO tries to play hardball and impose import restrictions on Russia they will get a surprise.   Both China and Russia
will collaborate to introduce a generic RISC CPU to replace both Intel and AMD.   The Elbrus is like some ivory tower research
project.  It is wonderful they got VLIW to actually work (Intel failed with Itanium) but they need a Plan B.  Making an Opteron/Xeon
clone would be worthwhile and they would not be starting from scratch.

It is true that majority of the small components for the motherboards are from China, but Kraftway spent millions in getting the equipment needed to make their own motherboards.

As for Elbrus and Xeon/Opterons - the purpose of the Elbrus 8C is to be exactly that, the MCST equivelent of those two line of processors.  Actually, in all purpose, the Xeons and Opterons are much like their desktop processors but more process is gone through in making them so they come out as effectively guaranteed to work.  More QC.  Elbrus 8C raw power is 250GFLOPS per processor and there are usually 4 of these processors in a single board per unit in a cluster.  It is more like they do not have the alternative to Intel and AMD's desktop processors.  VLIW is just another method of making a processor using a specific architecture vs CISC used by Intel and AMD.  

If USA wants to push out Intel and AMD from Russian market, there will be other methods.  They can acquire such processors from third parties in China and India (much like North Korea and Iran does), as well, put more emphasis in MCST microprocessors (Russia's largest HPC provider is T-Platforms, and I believe they are also releasing a system setup that uses Elbrus 2SM.  Now when Elbrus 8C comes out, that will increase even more demand), then there is Baikal processor (ARM) being created by T-Platforms subsidiary Baikal electronics which should be shown this year.  As well, Loongsong of China, whom makes a MIPS processor, would probably be introduced into Russian market and could also bring collaboration between MCST and Loongsong, or others.  Other makers like Module could also make their own if they so choose to.  The good thing is, Russia has the professionals as well as equipment in order to bypass these issues.

At my workplace, I replaced certain mainframes running IBM PowerPC's and a rack with VM's running on a Dell server, which cost roughly $3.5K for a single Intel Xeon 5570 and 8GB of ECCM R2 RAM. Couldn't believe it. It was well built, but my god. I mean, I understand that the additional power unit to run the RAID card and the console port without having PSU running 24/7 is not cheap, and same with the dual high quality PSU's used are expensive, but my lord. The profit margin was huge, especially when the companies pay an additional $400 for 24/7 support, within warranty period.

There are some issues with the Elbrus design. It takes a serious performance hit if you want to use 64 bit floating point.
The Intel and AMD server and desktop processors do not have any performance penalty in going from 32 bit fp to 64 bit.
The Elbrus seems optimized for power consumption and the die area is smaller than it would be if they designed it to
do 64 bit fp. I am quite certain this is not a limitation of VLIW.

However, low power consumption per core is valuable. Massively parallel systems suck huge amounts of power
including that required to cool them. Lower power per core means less heat emission.

This is all off topic, but an interesting challenge for import substitution.

kvs wrote:There are some issues with the Elbrus design.  It takes a serious performance hit if you want to use 64 bit floating point.
The Intel and AMD server and desktop processors do not have any performance penalty in going from 32 bit fp to 64 bit.
The Elbrus seems optimized for power consumption and the die area is smaller than it would be if they designed it to
do 64 bit fp.   I am quite certain this is not a limitation of VLIW.  

However, low power consumption per core is valuable.   Massively parallel systems suck huge amounts of power
including that required to cool them.  Lower power per core means less heat emission.    

This is all off topic, but an interesting challenge for import substitution.  

x86 is emulated on hardware level but of course there will be a drop in performance for this, it was not designed for it in mind.  CISC processors are natural x86.  That said, 64bit is barely used as only a few applications use it, but if lets say it is needed, I imagine they could develop a dedicated 64bit CPU.  Loongsong also suffers from the same issue with its MIPS processor.  If MCST was to go the route of CISC design, they would effectively have to steal all the instructions that Intel and AMD uses to be even close to competitive, outside of that, it is a pointless fight.  Maybe if they developed their own processor architecture to compete against ARM and MIPS, without being VLIW, may be a good chance.  They have experience with SPARC, but they seem to have dropped that more or less (just sticking with R1000 as their last possibly).

Edit: I was reading up on Loongsong3 processor and they added 200 instructions over loongsong 2 adding 5% total to die in x86 translation and it loses about 30% of the performance when operating in x86 environment.

I don't know why MCST really went with VLIW architecture. To me, it is complicated and Intel who has significantly more finances, decided to ditch as they couldn't get the performance out of Itanium. I am happy that MCST was able to get far better performance out of their VLIW than Intel, but if they put as much effort in VLIW design into MIPS, I imagine they would bring MIPS back into the main market. But, maybe they wanted something completely different than the others so they have their nitch market. But these days, MCST may get significantly more money in developing for civil use.

Who knows what they might do. Since this is their second architecture they are working on/with.

http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/webdiaeia2015d1_en.pdf

Transition economies experienced a 51% decline in their FDI inflows, reaching an estimated US$45 billion as regional conflict and sanctions on the Russian Federation the largest host country in the region − have deterred foreign investors (especially from developed countries)
.
FDI flows to the Russian Federation are estimated to have fallen by 70% to an estimated US$19 billion, due to both the country's negative growth prospects andthe exceptional level reached in 2013 ( because of the US$55 billion Rosneft−BP transaction) Major oil and gas companies based in developed countries have cancelled or withheld equity investments in the Russian Federation.

I was expecting a 50 % Fall in FDI to some where around $30 billion but 19 is a drastic fall

Russia’s anti-crisis program offers partial ‘pain relief’ — ex-finance minister Kudrin

CBR bought a record amount of gold in the first 11 months of 2014.