France requests to attend the August BRICS summit. Ukraine update.

0:00 Speaker 1 With us today is Mariokonomo, our friendly banker from New York, London, Zurich, and it gives us a report what’s going on in Europe and how it affects us in the United States. Mario, good morning, how are you?

0:16 Speaker 2 Yes, good morning, cats around table. I’m very well, thank you. So let’s just start the program off with a discussion regarding the European Central Bank and the fact that they increased the interest rate by twenty five basis points earlier this week and they are on schedule to increase it once again in July, and now eighty percent of the

0:35 analysts out there are saying that they will most likely continue to increase the interest rates in September. The European Commission, for its part, has said that all the European countries should not be providing any more salary increases. Companies should stop providing salary increases in order to help fight this a battle against inflation. And they’ve also said that moving forward,

1:00 all of the energy subsidies that various governments around the European Union were giving to individuals for their households to subsidize high energy costs, those now need to stop. So It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out in the fall and in the winter when the weather turns and people will need a lot of natural gas in

1:19 order to heat their homes. Once again.

1:23 Speaker 1 Understood. In the United States, they raised interest rates by well, they paused interest rates in Canada that are raised at a quarter point. But Powell in the United States threatened to increase rate your interest rates in the future, which I think they should consider dropping rates because they’re ruining the real estate economy. They’re ruining the banks. I mean,

1:47 you ruined the banks and you ruin the real estate economy in the United States. What’s next?

1:52 Speaker 2 Yes, well, the same thing is going to apply to Europe. And once again I have to say, they’re all working together and they’re all increasing rates, and I’m not sure why they’re increasing them so dramatically, and they’re not pausing to see if the measures they’ve taken thus far will actually have an impact on bringing inflation down. So far,

2:09 we are seeing inflation is slightly coming down, but that’s driven primarily by the fact that the costs of energy have come down dramatically. But it is what it is, and unfortunately a lot of people will suffer in the form of higher payments that they’re going to need to make in Europe regarding their mortgages, which, as we’ve discussed before,

2:28 are not fixed for thirty years. They’re actually mortgage rates which move along with interest rates up or down.

2:37 Speaker 1 Exactly tell us about Ukraine, Russia, anything going on.

2:41 Speaker 2 New yet, Yes, there’s a lot of things I wanted to touch on there. There is a very large NATO exercise that’s occurring in Germany. It’s called Air Defender twenty three, with roughly ten thousand people participating from twenty five countries and two hundred and fifty aircraft. The goal, of course, is for them to be able to show that NATO

3:01 can deter any type of an attack from any other country on European or NATO member countries. The Secretary General of NATO, Mister Stoltenberg, said something very interesting. He said that basically, the more gained that the Ukraine is able to achieve and it’s counteroffensive that’s now been launched against the Russian invasion, the stronger their negotiating hand will be

3:27 at the peace table. Now that I find a very interesting statement, because if you recall when this all started, nobody was prepared to discuss anything but the complete removal of all Russian troops from the Ukraine and back to what the original borders were. We’ve now moved the marker, and it looks like NATO is saying there’s going to

3:50 be a negotiation at the peace table and therefore we need to just go into it with a stronger hand. Itself is interesting because if we know we’re going to negotiate, maybe it makes sense to negotiate now instead of actually having a lot more people die for what may ultimately be a futile effort, and being able to have a

4:13 stronger position at the negotiating table.

4:15 Speaker 1 I got no questions because we’re unlimited time today. Nuclear burns in Belarus? Is that serious? Is that going to happen?

4:25 Speaker 2 They’re tactical nuclear warheads, and it looks like they’ve already been transported and put into the Belarus, into the country of Belarus. I don’t anticipate they’re going to be giving uh the access codes and the ability to the BELARUSI Belarussians to actually activate those and fire those. Those will remain under lock and key by the Russians themselves. But

4:48 it is a it is an escalation by the Russian side, and I think that the Russian side is adamant about the fact that it now controls roughly twenty percent of the Ukrainian Eastern territory and it’s not prepared to give that back.

5:06 Speaker 1 One more question, and we got a less than forty seconds. Is. Saudi Arabia is undermining the United States? What goes on with that?

5:22 Speaker 2 I don’t think it’s necessarily undermining the United States. I think Saudi Arabia is beginning to see that the world itself is changing very quickly, that Russia and China, along with the Bricks countries, are actually taking strong initiatives. We now know also that President macrona France has actually asked to be invited and to attend the Bricks Summit, which

5:41 will happen in August in South Africa. We know that Egypt itself has formally applied to join the Bricks. I don’t think Saudi Arabia itself is undermining. I think Saudi Arabia is seeing the quote unquote shifting sands, and it therefore wants to make sure that it’s positioned to do what is necessary.

5:59 Speaker 1 And you had the Saudia and you have the United States, Secretary of State on the way to China.

6:10 Speaker 2 Is that an appeasement, No, I think it’s a real polytique. We need to sit down and we need to speak with the rest of the world right now. What America and what Europe who’s following America is doing is obviously not working. The idea that we think that NATO is strong, and the idea that we think we can actually live

6:27 in a bubble and we don’t need access to three quarters of the remaining world’s population is ridiculous. We need to speak with people, we need to negotiate with people, and we need to have good trade agreements with all the countries in the world.

6:40 Speaker 1 Thank you so much, and we’ll catch up with you again next week. Thank you, Mario Konomo.

6:44 Speaker 2 Thank you mister Katsumethide’s enjoy your day.