Kiev's forces have lost most of their experienced fighters and ammunition is in short supply, the US paper has claimed

Kiev's forces have been so "degraded" by a year of fighting against Russia that some Ukrainian officials doubt their ability to execute a planned spring offensive, the Washington Post has reported.

The conflict has taken many of the most seasoned Ukrainian troops, with the arrival of inexperienced draftees changing the profile of the country's military, the US paper pointed out on Monday.

US and European officials have estimated that up 120,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or wounded since the launch of Russia's military operation last February, it added. Kiev keeps information abouts losses secret, even from its Western backers.

Becoming increasingly involved in the military confrontation between Ukraine and Russia is not a priority for the US, Florida's Republican governor Ron DeSantis wrote in response to a question posed by Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Monday.

Carlson asked several "2024 GOP hopefuls" whether opposing Russia in Ukraine was a "vital strategic interest" for the US and shared DeSantis' response on Twitter. The governor stated that the US had many "vital national interests," such as securing its borders, addressing the recruitment crisis within the US military, achieving energy security and independence, and "checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party."

However, becoming "further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them," DeSantis noted.

In Part 1 we noted that "money" is no more than a medium of exchange. If we cooperate in sufficient numbers, we could create an economy based upon an entirely voluntary monetary system. We don't need banks to control our exchange transactions and modern Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has made voluntary exchange on a global scale entirely feasible.

We contrasted the true nature of "money" with the proposed Central Bank Digital Currencies. CBDC is being rolled out across the world by a global public-private partnership . What we call money is actually fiat currency conjured out of thin air by central and commercial banks. Even so, CBDC is nothing like "money" as we currently understand it.

Prior to the pseudopandemic, fiat currency circulated in a split-monetary circuit. Only commercial banks could access a type of money called "central bank reserves" or "base money." In late 2019, the global financial institution BlackRock introduced a monetary plan that advocated "going direct" in order "to get central bank money directly in the hands of public and private sector spenders."

There has been an avalanche of information and numerous theories circulating the past few days about the fate of a bank in California know as SVB (Silicon Valley Bank). SVB was the 16^th largest bank in the US until it abruptly failed and went into insolvency on March 10^th. The impetus for the collapse of the bank is tied to a $2 billion liquidity loss on bond sales which caused the institution's stock value to plummet over 60%, triggering a bank run by customers fearful of losing some or most of their deposits.

There are many fine articles out there covering the details of the SVB situation, but what I want to talk about more is the root of it all. The bank's shortfalls are not really the cause of the crisis, they are a symptom of a wider liquidity drought that I predicted here at Alt-Market months ago, including the timing of the event.

First, though, let's discuss the core issue, which is fiscal tightening and the Federal Reserve. In my article 'The Fed's Catch-22 Taper Is A Weapon, Not A Policy Error', published in December of 2021, I noted that the Fed was on a clear path towards tightening into economic weakness, very similar to what they did in the early 1980s during the stagflation era and also somewhat similar to what they did at the onset of the Great Depression. Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke even openly admitted that the Fed caused the depression to spiral out of control due to their tightening policies.

In an exclusive interview with The Cradle, Russia's top macroeconomics strategist criticizes Moscow's slow pace of financial reform and warns there will be no new global currency without Beijing.
The headquarters of the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) in Moscow, linked to the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) is arguably one of the most crucial nodes of the emerging multipolar world.

That's where I was received by Minister of Integration and Macroeconomics Sergey Glazyev - who was previously interviewed in detail by The Cradle - for an exclusive, expanded discussion on the geoeconomics of multipolarity.

Glazyev was joined by his top economic advisor Dmitry Mityaev, who is also the secretary of the Eurasian Economic Commission's (EEC) science and technology council. The EAEU and EEC are formed by Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia. The group is currently engaged in establishing a series of free trade agreements with nations from West Asia to Southeast Asia.

Our conversation was unscripted, free flowing and straight to the point. I had initially proposed some talking points revolving around discussions between the EAEU and China on designing a new gold/commodities-based currency bypassing the US dollar, and how it would be realistically possible to have the EAEU, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and BRICS+ to adopt the same currency design.

Glazyev and Mityaev were completely frank and also asked questions on the Global South. As much as extremely sensitive political issues should remain off the record, what they said about the road towards multipolarity was quite sobering - in fact realpolitik-based.

Glazyev stressed that the EEC cannot ask for member states to adopt specific economic policies. There are indeed serious proposals on the design of a new currency, but the ultimate decision rests on the leaders of the five permanent members. That implies political will - ultimately to be engineered by Russia, which is responsible for over 80 percent of EAEU trade.

It's quite possible that a renewed impetus may come after the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to Moscow on March 21, where he will hold in-depth strategic talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Just occasionally, a window is opened onto the truth of how the 'system' works. Momentarily, it stands naked in its degeneracy. We avert our eyes, yet, it is a revelation (though it shouldn't be). For, we see clearly how tawdry has been the attire which clothed it. 'Liberalism's' seeming success - almost wholly an ephemeral PR production - serves only to make its underlying internal contradictions more obvious; more 'in your face' - much less credible.

This unravelling speaks to a failure to satisfactorily resolve liberal modernity's inherent contradictions. Or, rather its unravelling derives from the choice to resolve a waning legitimacy, through an ever more totalistic and ideological reaching for hegemony.

One such window has been the sordid affair of the UK pandemic lockdowns - as revealed by a paper trail leak of 100,000 ministerial WhatsApp messages, managing the lockdown project.

What did they show (in the words here of pro-government leading political commentators)? An ugly picture of how a western Establishment interacts in adolescent sniping at each other, and in its utter disdain for the populace.

What lies behind this week's scenes in Tbilisi and why was Russia again used as a scapegoat?

Tbilisi's main street, Rustaveli Avenue, was blocked for several days this week as thousands of people chanted anti-government slogans in front of the parliament building and sang the Georgian national anthem. Even more protesters gathered at the square in the evenings. By nightfall, the enraged crowd was throwing firecrackers, stones, and Molotov cocktails at the police, attempting to take down an iron fence and storm the parliament. The police used water cannons to promptly put out the fires and showered the crowds with water, at the same time spraying tear gas to disperse those present.

What led to this violent confrontation is perhaps difficult to understand from the perspective of a Western reader. It wasn't a "civil society" uprising in the sense you might find, for example, in a country like France. Instead, it was organized by people whose livelihoods were threatened by the proposed legislation.

Germany is facing an inevitable economic decline after losing its access to Russian energy, but cannot do anything about it because it is not a sovereign nation, the secretary of the Russian National Security Council has claimed.

"Germany tried for many years to build its economy on a combination of cheap Russian energy and advanced German technologies. Like no one else, it realizes that the terrorist attack against the [Nord Stream pipelines] will definitely cause the German economy to decline further," Nikolay Patrushev said in an interview published in Argumenti i Fakti newspaper on Monday.

The advantages that German businesses enjoyed by getting access to Russian fuel has long irritated the governments of the US and the UK, he continued. But Berlin is not at liberty to continue cooperating with Moscow, "because the German nation is not independent."

In a recent interview, Nicholas Burns, the US Ambassador to China, after labelling China the 'threat', bluntly said: "We're the leader in this [Indo-Pacific] region. [And We're] staying". The interviewer, US Congressman Mike Gallagher, described America's new Cold War as no polite tennis match, but an existential struggle for life in the 21st century.

President Xi's earlier attempt to reach a 'new détente' with the US during the November G20 at Bali -- effectively an attempt to explore whether a minimum modus vivendi with US were possible -- is over.

The hysteria over the Chinese balloon; the increasing evidence that Ukraine is descending to a débacle for the Biden Administration in the Bakhmut area; and the coarse threats of 'consequences' for China were it to support Russia militarily (and at the very moment when Washington was promising more weapons for Taiwan), were too much for Beijing.

The latest headlines, of course, are all pointing toward the ripple effect of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), and they should be.

This banking metaphor for the tech sector in particular and the previously described disaster in California as a whole or the matter of banking risk as a theme, require understanding and attention, provided below.

Once we get past a forensic look at the data and forces which explain SVB's demise, we quickly discover that SVB is itself just a symbol of a much larger financial (and banking) crisis which ties together nearly all of the major macro forces we've been tracking since Powell began his QE to QT quest to be Volcker-reborn.

That is, we confirm that everything comes back to the Fed and bond market in general and the UST market in particular. But as I've argued for years, and will say again now: The bond market is the thing.

By the end of this brief report, we also discover that SVB is just the beginning; contagion inside and outside of the banking sector is about to get worse. Or stated more bluntly: "We aint seen nothing yet."

But first, let's look at the banks in Silicon Valley...