Soviet Union Financial News

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The contest between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos is only going to get more heated now that the two are directly competing for the moon. After years of charting a path to Mars, Musk surprisingly announced this past week that SpaceX is pivoting to the moon, where he wants to build a “self-growing city." That puts him in the same space camp as rival Bezos, who has bet that focusing on the moon would give his rocket company, Blue Origin, an advantage.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Last week, US President Donald Trump’s historic two-day meeting with Chinese Premier Xi Jinping, the first in Beijing at this level since 2017, ended without a commercial breakthrough despite the presence of a high-powered technology delegation of 17 American CEOs, including Elon Musk of SpaceX and Jensen Huang of Nvidia. China did not respond to US overtures, including the potential sale of Nvidia’s cutting-edge H200 chips to Chinese entities that the Joe Biden administration had blocked and Trump administration reversed. US officials dismissed a lack of business progress as immaterial.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Ever since coming to power more than a quarter-century ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin built a new state religion around May 9, the anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany and the holiest day in the Russian calendar.On Saturday, Putin will for the first time preside over a Victory Day parade held as his war on Ukraine has exceeded the length of the Soviet Union’s war on the Nazis.He has no victories to celebrate. Persistent Ukrainian drone strikes across Russia, including on the capital, have forced Putin to ask for a cease-fire for the duration of the festivities.

the Netherlands has produced—under judicial compulsion and apparently with a straight face—is a mechanism that may force investors to sell assets simply to fund tax bills on gains that have not actually been realized.The broader concern is not the Dutch policy alone, but the trend it represents.Spend time in any corner of social media where economics is debated and you will encounter a growing community of neo-socialists who have arrived at a remarkable conclusion: socialism did not fail—it was simply never implemented properly.In this narrative, the Soviet Union, Maoist China and Cuba were merely flawed attempts at what is fundamentally a sound idea.The right people, armed with modern technology and the right intentions, will supposedly get it right this time.Within this worldview, taxing paper gains is not seen as overreach but as an obvious act of justice. The rich are simply too rich; their wealth—even the theoretical kind—is viewed as an affront that the state should correct.The notion that market value represents real money that the government is entitled to immediately, rather than when an asset is sold, fits neatly into this framework.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Last Thursday, when Rahul Gandhi was railing against the government, I was reminded of Manmohan Singh. Though the Lok Sabha chair scuttled Rahul’s allegations, let me elaborate on this scenario by illustrating incidents related to Singh.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Like a nonagenarian on a ventilator, the most significant arms-control treaty of the last half century quietly expired last week. Those who were responsible for keeping it alive—septuagenarians and octogenarians all—shrugged: ‘What’s to be done, it’s time had come.’ In the salacious excitement of the Epstein revelations of naughty A-lister names, the death of the most meaningful collective security agreement of our lifetime and what it implies barely merited headlines.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said his government is willing to engage with the Trump administration as the Communist island braces for severe fuel shortages after the U.S. threatened to impose trade sanctions to countries shipping oil to the Communist island.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. NEW DELHI : The air in Davos this year was thick with trepidation. It wasn’t just anxiety about the global economy that weighed on those gathered at the World Economic Forum.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. US President Donald Trump’s speech at Davos was meant to be a bellwether for the trans-Atlantic relationship, particularly Nato, with his handling of Greenland closely watched. After the speech, it appears Nato has survived, but barely.

release of a highly competitive chatbot caused a sensation in early 2025. Dubbed the “DeepSeek moment,” it immediately prompted analogies to the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957. But do such spectacles really mean that China is closing the gap with the West?In considering that question, it is important to bear in mind that no industrial revolution has ever emerged outside advanced democratic capitalism.

In 1980, neither China nor India had much representation in the ‘global middle class’—people who neither belong to the bottom half of the income distribution nor rank among the top 10% worldwide. Almost a half-century later, things have changed—but in very different ways.

This week’s visit to India of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has drawn New Delhi’s long relationship with Moscow into the spotlight. The India-Russia bond has been strong and steady, as evident in the fact that it has outlasted many shifts in global geopolitics. Looking at the cooperation between the two, whether it is on defence materiel or navigating past twists and turns in the global order, India and Russia have understood each other’s requirements and managed to support each other in their time of need.

JD Vance and Second Lady Usha Vance will be visiting the Pituffik Space Base in Greenland on Friday to receive a briefing on Arctic security issues and engage with US service members, as per a release from the Office of the US Vice President on Tuesday (local time). According to the release, the space base, which is operated by the US Space Force's 821st Space Base Group, is the northernmost installation of the US Department of Defence. The base plays a critical role in missile warning, missile defence, and space surveillance missions. Vance also took to X, stating that he is «looking forward to visiting Greenland on Friday.» In a video message in the same post, Vance said, «I'm going to visit some of our guardians in the Space Force on the northwest coast of Greenland and also check out what is going on with the security there in Greenland.»

Vladimir Putin scored a coup by discussing with Donald Trump in highly anticipated phone talks everything from improving bilateral ties to Iran and even hockey matches, but stopping well short of agreeing any peace path to end the war in Ukraine, analysts say. During the call on Tuesday, Putin refused a full ceasefire agreement proposed by Washington but focused instead on reviving Russian-American cooperation that has been frozen since Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The very fact such talks took place was an achievement for the Kremlin, said Ekaterina Schulmann, a Russian political scientist based in Berlin. «The two superpowers are discussing the fate of the world and the future of humanity,» she told AFP, summing up Moscow's thinking. «It is a great achievement for Russia which reproduces a Soviet-era narrative without being the Soviet Union.»

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Tesla CEO Elon Musk suggested the U.S. exit the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO.

That was the reaction of many who witnessed the televised spat between US President Donald Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the Oval Office last week. Beyond the memes and the jokes, it was the clearest sign that there is a new world order in the making. Of new friendships being forged, old ones being discarded. Some existing alliances slayed it for eight decades after World War II. But it is in the nature of relationships that things turn. The Soviet Union and the US had fought as allies against Germany, Japan and Italy up until 1945. It didn’t take long for that relationship to become salty, resulting in the Cold War.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Soon after Donald Trump won the presidential election in November, Xi Jinping asked his aides to urgently analyze the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. His concern, according to people who consult with senior Chinese officials, was that as President Trump gears up for a showdown with Beijing, China could get isolated like Moscow during that era.

With unemployment at a record low 2.3%, President Vladimir Putin has flagged labour shortages as a problem and on Friday steelmaker Severstal criticised a regional move to ban migrant workers in construction. Citizens from the former Soviet Union have traditionally dominated Russia's migrant workforce.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has issued a warning to European nations, claiming that if Ukraine fails to resist Russia’s invasion, Putin may turn his attention to five other countries.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. President Trump has dramatically shifted the direction of U.S. foreign policy in four short weeks, making the U.S.