Amos Hochstein, whose title of Special Coordinator for International Energy Affairs is one of longest yet least impressive in memory, said he “remains optimistic” that Russia would keep exporting the same volumes of oil in the face of a cap on prices, citing the fact that Russia is already selling much of its oil at discounted prices.
“We already are seeing evidence in the market that Russia is selling its oil at a significant discount. So we wanna put that max,” Hochstein told Yahoo Finance. “So we know that they're willing to sell it at a discount in order to be able to sell it, because frankly they have cash in the bank, that is true, but they don't have anything else.”
Yes, Putin has cash in the bank. A record-high amount of cash, in fact. So much case that the country’s central bank recently LOWERED interest rates as the central banks in the West were all raising theirs.
Yes, Russia is selling oil at discounted prices, but it is doing so on its own terms. One of the major results of its voluntary discount selling has been to establish new, elevated trading relationships with countries like India and Iran and China and others around the world. The program has not just been a major financial boon to Putin, but a major geopolitical boon as well.
But again, this has all been done on Putin’s own terms. Putin has decided how much to discount the oil and which countries to sell to and how to leverage the oil sales into follow-on agreements involving other goods and elements. This is right in Putin’s personal wheelhouse - something he is far better at doing than any of his Western counterparts.
Hochstein and other Biden people see this happening and think, hey, that means that Putin will just bend over and take it if we try to implement and enforce a hard price cap regime through the UN or some other international body. That is a mind-numbingly brain dead thought. It is also completely brain dead to think that Russian trading partners like India, China and Saudi Arabia would be willing to assist in any such international effort, and without their cooperation, any such effort would be dead on arrival.
But this is what passes for critical thinking in this administration among its high officials with very, very long titles beside their names. And that explains so much about the fix America and the EU find themselves in these days where energy is concerned.