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TOKYO -- Gold buying by central banks reached its highest level in 55 years, data released Tuesday shows, as the freezing of Russia's dollar assets spurred countries to seek alternatives less vulnerable to economic sanctions. Net purchases of the metal by central banks in 2022 totaled 1,135 tonnes in 2022, according to a report from the World Gold Council, an industry group. This was the highest since 1967, when European banks bought gold en masse as U.S. deficits and the devaluation of the British pound began to undermine the link between gold and the dollar. Last year's buying spree is...

Fox News host Jesse Watters analyzes Hunter Biden’s alleged shady business dealings on "Jesse Watters Primetime." JESSE WATTERS: The Bidens are all over FBI wiretaps talking to China. The FBI was investigating Patrick Ho, a Chinese bagman who eventually got caught for bribing African leaders and helping Iran evade sanctions. Real nice guy. Ho was the VP for the Chinese energy company that was getting the Bidens rich, but Ho was also a spy and Hunter knew he was a spy.... ...The FBI knew Ho was an intelligence agent and they were listening to his phone calls and the FBI...

Iran attracts a few tourists who love to see, and if possible, fly on vintage airliners that have vanished from the skies elsewhere. US sanctions on the sale of airliners containing US-manufactured components make it impossible to sell not just Boeings but also Airbus planes, which rely on engines, avionics and other bits and pieces which are developed and made in the USA. As a result, the airlines of Iran rely on old models that were flying in Iran before the Islamic Revolution, or which have been smuggled into the country by devious means. A cloak and dagger tale has...

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked a major market crisis, sending oil and gas prices to multi-decade highs and causing the Euro to crash below parity with the dollar. Today, energy prices have fallen back to pre-war levels, driven lower by fears of a global recession and weak oil demand in China due to Covid outbreaks. Analysts remain divided regarding oil prices in 2023 however, with some analysts believing the return of China and the lack of Russian energy will send prices soaring.

MOSCOW — Russia is ready to negotiate with all parties involved in the war in Ukraine but Kyiv and its Western backers have refused to engage in talks, President Vladimir Putin said in an interview aired Sunday. Russia's Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine has triggered the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War Two and the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. There is, thus far, little end in sight to the war. The Kremlin says it will fight until all its aims are achieved while Kyiv says it will not rest until...

Chinese telecommunications and smartphone giant Huawei Technologies Co is closing down its enterprise business unit in Russia in a further retreat that affects 2,000 jobs... Huawei’s Enterprise Business Group division in Russia, responsible for selling data storage systems and telecommunications equipment to corporate clients, will be disbanded on January 1... The move has been made to avoid the risk of secondary sanctions on the telecoms giant, which is already subject to US trade sanctions, as the systems and equipment could be used by the state, according to the report... ...Several Chinese firms have been caught in the crossfire created by...

Russia was "ill prepared" for the economic response to the invasion. Western countries have slapped crippling economic sanctions on Russia, and in November, Russia's economy entered a recession. Putin planned for a quick war, but "Russian guns have now been firing for almost 300 days" and "the cupboard is bare," Radakin went on to say, echoing US officials who have pointed out that Russia is running through its munitions faster than it can replenish them. Russia has lost much of the territory it managed to occupy in the early days of the invasion. A Ukrainian counteroffensive that began in recent...

Russian crude-oil exports have taken a serious hit since new sanctions and a price cap came into force earlier in the week, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that figures from two data providers on Russian crude both show a big fall, though their magnitudes differ. According to one commodity-analytics firm Kpler, Russia’s seaborne exports fell by nearly 500,000 barrels per day on Tuesday, a 16% decline from the November average of 3.08 million bpd. Meanwhile, TankerTrackers.com, which tracks sea vessels using signals and satellite images, has reported that Russia's crude exports fell by nearly 50%. With shipments from the...

Some interesting stuff on Telegram's Intel Slava Z feed, that seems like it might be related to other deep state looting that we see going on. 🏳️‍🌈🇷🇺 Western countries cannot fulfill their own sanctions and block two-thirds of the reserves of the Russian Central Bank. Because no one knows where they are. After the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, the G7 countries decided to block Russia's gold and foreign exchange reserves located abroad, which were estimated at $300 billion. But in the end, less than a third of this amount was arrested, and the rest was simply not found. This...

Dzhankoy, a rail and road hub in northern Crimea, 50 miles south of the Ukrainian mainland, was a critical node in Russia’s supply network before September, when Ukrainian forces launched a counteroffensive that ultimately liberated much of Russian-occupied southern Ukraine. Now, as Russian field armies reposition on the left bank of the Dnipro River, just south of the newly-liberated port city of Kherson, Dzhankoy is even more important to the Russian war effort. The Kremlin is reorganizing its supply network for the southern front. Dzhankoy is at the center of the new network. Ukrainian planners know this. So it should...

... The situation has worsened considerably since the summer when, buoyed by a steady stream of oil and gas revenue, the Russian economy seemed to stabilize. Figures released by the Finance Ministry last week show a key economic indicator—tax revenue from the non-oil and gas sector—fell 20 percent year in October compared with a year earlier, while the Russian state statistics agency Rosstat reported that retail sales fell 10 percent year on year in September, and cargo turnover fell 7 percent.... “The spiral is escalating, and there is no way out of this now.” ... The Western ban on technology...

The U.S. Department of the Treasury has issued general licenses (GL) for carrying out transactions for the supply of crude oil from Russia to Japan, Bulgaria, Croatia, and EU countries, which do not include states that border the sea, the agency reported on Nov. 22. In effect, these licenses pro-vide a limited legal method to bypass the current oil-related sanctions measures on Russia.

German gas storage facilities have already exceeded the fill level target of 95 per cent for 1 November. ...According to data from the transparency platform AGSI+, the storage facilities were 98.91 per cent full (as of 31 October).

Russia’s finance ministry has slashed its forecast for taxable oil production for next year, a draft budget seen by Reuters showed on Friday. The draft budget covers the next three years and forecasts a decline in crude oil production and refining as Western sanctions bite... The finance ministry sees Russian oil and gas condensate production... a 7% - 8% decline from... (what) the ministry anticipated this year (after having already adjusted this year's estimate downward)... Expected oil refining volumes were cut by nearly 20%... The refusal of some countries to work with Russia in the oil markets and having to...

Having survived the recent cabinet reshuffle the international development secretary, Penny Mordaunt, is confronted with the biggest headache of her short ministerial career: the fallout of the US intention to cut funding to UNRWA, which constitutes one of the most serious challenges to UK policies in the Middle East. Donald Trump’s threat to cut financial assistance to the UN agency specifically responsible for Palestinian refugees will be a disaster not only for the refugees but also for Israel and neighbouring countries. It does not advance US interests either. Provoked by the Palestinian rejection of Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as...

Uss, who was detained in Milan, was charged in relation to a scheme to unlawfully obtain U.S. military technology and sanctioned Venezuelan oil in order to support Russia’s war effort in Ukraine, according to charges unsealed by the U.S. Department of Justice this week. “We are categorically against this and we condemn the practice of these kinds of arrests of Russian citizens,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. Uss’ father, the governor of Russia’s Krasnoyarsk Krai region, Alexander Uss, has suggested the arrest is politically motivated, according to TASS. Another Russian government spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, said Moscow would not leave the...

Belarus said on Wednesday it was unable to repay its foreign currency-denominated debt due to sanctions imposed on it by the European Union and the United States. The World Bank said on Monday it had placed all loans made by its main lending arm to Belarus into "nonperforming" status effective immediately.

Hungary's government does not back a proposal for the European Union to start a training mission for the Ukrainian army as this would risk escalating the war, Peter Szijjarto, the foreign minister, on Monday in Luxembourg, where he noted that he lawfully made himself absent from the vote, the only EU member state representative to do so.The minister noted that his absence had not prevented the proposal from being approved, but Hungary does not want to contribute to the costs of the operation.“Anything leading to escalation is not something we think is a good idea,” he said during a break...

Russia has lost 60% of its raw oil shipping market in Europe after launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In the next two months, the market for Russia will almost completely disappear, and new sanctions will make it difficult to redirect flows to other directions, Bloomberg reports. Russian oil supplies to Europe averaged 630,000 barrels a day a month ago, down from 1.62 million before the full-scale war began.... The rate of sea exports of Russian oil at 604,000 barrels per day is the lowest rate for the year. Flows fell by 56,000 barrels per day, or 8%, compared to...

Preliminary data from Russia's Finance Ministry showed that the country's fiscal surplus shrank to 55 billion rubles ($860 million) in the first nine months of the year, down from 137 billion roubles ($2.15 billion), Bloomberg reported. Olga Bychkova, an economist at Moody's Analytics, told Newsweek that the Russian government surplus is 30 times lower, when compared to the same period last year.... She predicted the government budget would post a modest surplus of 0.6 percent in 2022 on high energy prices but flip to a deep deficit of around nine percent in 2023 due to limited growth, imports, and the...