16:35 “Something I noticed from the moment I heard this Euros per Rubles program, you see, the Europeans, in their sanction-mania, basically put a guillotine between the European economies and the Russian economy.“
“As a practical matter, it is now illegal to trade Euros for Rubles in the European zone, and so, the only way to get Rubles is by going to Gazprom, because the system, for those that don’t know, the system is very simple: if I am a European company that needs to buy gas for whatever reason, I go to Gazprom Bank, I make a deposit in Euros, Gazprom Bank opens a parallel account in my name in Rubles, they are the ones who exchange my Euros for Rubles, and I take those Rubles and I pay Gazprom for the gas that I need. That’s the system.”
“Now the thing is, you see, I can not show up with Rubles and pay. Gazprom Bank has said specifically that nobody can do this, because they want to close some loopholes that is not important for this conversation, but the point is you can only go with Euros, deposit them, and get Rubles. But who values those Euros? Gazprom. Gazprom can set whatever price it wants for those Euros that I deposited with them. If they want to be generous, they can give me 85 Rubles per Euro. If they want to be nasty, they can say 65. And how am I to challenge that? How am I to get any kind of redress? I can’t.“
“In fact, there is no way for me to get Rubles to buy the gas that I need for my company. And you see, because of the scheme, or the program, whatever you want to call it, Gazprom Bank can give preferential treatment to any company that it wants to, from any nationality. Say, I’m a Serbian company, now Serbia uses the Dinar but of course for their foreign currency exchanges they use the Euro, they would have Euros, they would go to Gazprom Bank, they would deposit them, and because I’m a Serbian company and Serbia is friendly to Russia, it’s not on the «unfriendly nations» list, on the contrary, Gazprom can say «oh, Mr. Serbia, here you go, 85 Rubles per Euro», but if I’m a German company, Gazprom can easily say «well, you’re only going to get 70 Rubles per Euro», and that price differential, which in this hypothetical case is 20%, would render one company extremely profitable, competitive, because it would have cheap energy, because these Rubles can only be used to buy gas, and so, what Gazprom Bank is doing by this scheme, is essentially, it will be able to fine-tune, and literally crash, any country’s economy if they don’t play their game.”
“And worst of all, the Russians are expanding the system to encompass not just natural gas, but also oil. Rosneft which is the big oil company in Russia is planning on rolling out a program very similar to Gazprom’s, and they will probably be linked up somehow eventually. And the same can be said insofar as agricultural commodities, industrial commodities, metals, different gasses, different industrial products. So all of a sudden, the Kremlin will have enormous power over the Eurozone, as a practical matter, the Russians, if they start to fiddle with the exchange rate for different companies from different countries, they get different rates, will have essentially broken the Eurozone, because the Euro will no longer be fungible, it will have different valuations in different places, geographically, and the consequences of this will be catastrophic for Europe.”
“I mean, people haven’t really thought this through. This is a big deal.”