THIRTY-FIVE FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ANSWERED 253That’s a compound question. Putin is a non-economic player.
He’s a power player.
I met with some top national security experts in Washington
recently. We had CIA officials, US ambassadors, think tank-
ers, people from the Defense Department, people from the
Treasury Department and from the financial world. There
were about fifteen of us around the table behind closed doors
and we talked this through.
Believe it or not, I laughed at them. I did it in a nice, re-
spectful way but I said, “This is the worst case of mirror imag-
ing I’ve ever seen.” Mirror imaging is an intelligence analytical
flaw where you make the mistake of thinking the other guy
thinks the way you do.
The mistake the U.S. is making is thinking that Putin thinks
like us. The U.S. thinks that if we inflict enough economic pain
on Putin you’ll change his behavior because if he inflicted eco-
nomic pain on us it would change our behavior. But Putin is
not like us, and we are not like him.
In other words, sanctions don’t work on Putin. He has other
goals, priorities and ways of thinking about it. So, the short answer
is no. But that doesn’t mean that the U.S. won’t persist in escalat-
ing the conflict because we are thinking about it the wrong way.
- Is now a good time to consider the ruble and
Russia’s oil sector?
With the understanding that it is more of a speculation
than investment — and only as a small slice of an investor’s
portfolio — yes, I don’t think it’s too soon to look at Russia.
The ruble has been down almost 60 percent. Their stock mar-
ket is down and their economy is in recession. That’s a good
time to buy, quite often. Russia’s not going away. It’s the eighth
largest economy in the world. It has a population of about 150
million people, is a nuclear state and it’s heavily integrated
with Europe. So Russia’s not going to zero.