| Rikki-Nyx |
07-25-2014 11:05 AM |
How long until they assassinate Putin?
http://news.yahoo.com/russian-execs-...103658481.html
Then last week, the U.S. announced new sanctions that had investors in Russia fear a turn for the worse. The U.S. shut off its financial markets for a broad swath of defense companies as well as Russia's largest oil company, Rosneft, gas producer Novatek, which is half-owned by a close Putin ally, and a major bank, VEB. The move offered business executives a glimpse of what they had thought would never happen: serious international isolation.
According to Alexis Rodzianko, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia, those sanctions were the first to really pack a punch because they were "broader and more specific: they went beyond the symbolic."
Reinforcing those concerns, the European Union said Friday it is planning newer, tougher penalties on businesses.
"Over the past few months, there was a sense that Mr. Putin acted decisively, forcefully, and correctly, and that everybody else in the world would accommodate themselves to that reality and we'd get back to something like business as usual," said Bernard Sucher, a Moscow-based entrepreneur and board member of Aton, an independent investment bank. "Now we're talking about real fear."
When the Malaysian airliner went down one day later, investors worried conditions would deteriorate further.
The stock market has fallen over 6 percent since Thursday last week. Investors keep pulling money out of the country. They withdrew $74.6 billion in the first six months of the year, a figure forecast to reach $100 billion for the whole of 2014 — almost twice the $60 billion in withdrawals seen last year.
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