I'm out for a walk, was passing by, and stopped to poke at this roadkill with a stick, today...
A quick survey of SI posts on the subject of Russia shows that what little investment interest there once was, died back in 2012 to 2014... with the only posts since then being focused instead on the fact of increasingly overt conflict with Russia, and/or the politics of the yet to be unwound issues around the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.
Lost in the sources of the noise in the geopolitics... is that the pace of change in the rest of the world is not being matched by the pace of change occurring in Russia. The pace of change and the accumulated impacts of change in China... thus bump up against the eastern border with Russia somewhat less like a physical boundary and somewhat more like a time warp...
At the end of the Cold War Russia was left adrift... way out there at the wild and wooly end of the investment markets... and within that... the Russian Far East was an outlier at the frontier of the frontier... which in the last decade has been left as more of a vacuum for survivors to escape than an opportunity to be investigated.
China's intrinsic industriousness... bumps against Russia's inherent if not learned tolerance of inefficiency and bureaucratic malaise... the blindness to incentive inherited through a combination of the learned surrender to bureaucracy and paired up with corruption in the thugocracy... and the intrinsic paranoia that comes paired with Russians failure to understand why they're not "winning"... when the only reason is Russia's overly cautious refusal to participate... while at the same time surrendering to the corruption.
That reality has been exemplified no where better than in China and Russia reaching agreement on building a bridge between them... across a river border. Loudly touted at the time of the agreement, and on and off again since then... it took seemingly forever from (1988 or 2007) to 2016 for it to take shape as an actual project that was really happening. And, then, the plan required China to build its half of the bridge, Russia to build their half, with a planned meeting in the middle. China built their half in about six months... leaving half of a bridge standing there alone for the last couple of years... Wikipedia: "By July 2016, the Chinese portion of the bridge was finished but work had not started on the much shorter Russian portion. [10] In December 2016, work began on the Russian portion of the bridge. [1]"
Recently... Russia's lethargy has lifted enough that even father time has a pulse, it seems ? The two sides of the bridge were finally joined structurally in March, and the structure was finally solidified in May of this year... and they are now "on pace" to open the bridge for use beginning in April of 2020...
The immediate impacts should be limited to IRC ltd (SEHK: 1029) and parent Petropavlovsk plc (LSE: POG) as the iron ore product will be able to move from Russia to China easily for the first time...
My interest is in understanding the opening as perhaps being something more symbolic...
Will China succeed, where the west has not, in dragging Russia out of its malaise and into the modern world... or will the Russians intrinsic paranoia and even greater mistrust and fear of success instead overcome the benefits of the changes that are finally occurring, and result in some inevitable catastrophe ?
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