Given all the news this week of Russia and Italy's South Stream deal with Turkey in exchange for a nuclear power plant, I thought I would repost an article written by Robert Amsterdam last fall in Energy Risk on Turkey's political pipelines.

FROM OCT. 2008, ENERGY RISK:

Turkey's political pipelines

Turkey's strategic position at the crossroads of East and West has put it at the centre of a geopolitical tug of war, with energy supply a key driver. Robert Amsterdam examines the energy policies being brought to bear in the region

Turkey's role in global affairs is defined by its geostrategic importance as the bridge between Europe and the Near East. Following Russia's invasion and occupation of Georgia in August, which caused considerable energy supply jitters, Turkey was once again thrust into the spotlight as the European

...

Just a few more thoughts on all this Joe Biden-Russia stuff.  For one, I am in complete agreement with Steve LeVine's opinion that Biden's "firm grasp of reality" is pretty much taken out of context in the WSJ headline - he never said that Russia "would bend" to anyone's will, just that they will or won't make choices according to interests.  Second, we can't be sure that this was an "intentional" shot across the bow ... the colloquial language Biden was using made this seem like a leaked background interview.  Lastly, I think that nobody has been giving attention to all the Russian sabre-rattling right after the U.S.-Russia Summit, which included the Kaliningrad missile threat, driving missile launches on Ukrainian streets, and other hostile gestures.  Biden may have been responding to this.Take a deep breath before reading this, but ...

Ariel Cohen has a new piece in the Washington Times, which has some very interesting material on Russia's growing diplomatic overtures to Mongolia to seal up uranium supplies, as well as some info on a letter sent by President Barack Obama to the president of Azeribaijan (let's see if Ilham Aliyev treats him a bit better than Dick Cheney).As the rain falls on St. Petersburg's glitzy economic forum and the Obama administration plans its summit meeting with Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev in July to negotiate Moscow's accession to the World Trade Organization, Russia is consolidating its geostrategic advantage from the Gobi desert to the Black Sea. The U.S. and Europe had better take notice. While the talk of high-tech diversification appeals to Western businessmen, the real show is happening thousands of miles away from the capital Peter the Great built on these grim ...

With large budget deficits in place and projected going forward, as well as the expansion of the Fed's balance sheet, there's been some talk of inflationary pressures, and even hyper-inflation [0] McCain. I wondered if these fears were manifested in survey- and market-based expectations measures.

For certain, there is little pressure apparent in short term forecasts like the WSJ and Survey of Professional Forecasters. This makes sense (at least if one believes in the Keynesian conception of an output gap [1]) given the amount of slack displayed in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Median expected ten year inflation recorded as of second month of each quarter, from Survey of Professional Forecasters (blue, left scale), actual CBO-defined output gap (red line), and WSJ forecasted (purple triangle), in log percentage points. NBER defined recessions shaded gray; second recession assumed to end 2009Q3. Source: Cleveland Fed, BEA, GDP 2009Q1 ...

Gold didn’t do much in the Far East or Europe on Wednesday…but the bottom, if you want to call it that, occurred shortly after the start of floor trading on the Comex yesterday morning in New York. From that low, gold rose steadily…gaining a little over $20 between then and the close of electronic trading at 5:15 yesterday afternoon. In the process, it set another new high for this move.

For the most part, silver’s action mirrored gold. The low of the day was at the London silver fix (noon London…7 a.m. New York). From there it rose, just like gold…closing at a new high for this leg up. And, for the second day in a row, I was underwhelmed by the performance of the HUI.

In the last three days, I’ve noticed that there has been a change in pattern during Far East trading. It’s not a lot, but it’s something

...

Key News• Oil prices fell below $53 to almost a two-year low . (AP)• The yield on two-year US Treasury bonds hit a record low of 1.06 per cent, responding both to the fresh flight to safety and the prospect of lower interest rates. Eurozone government bond futures hit their highest level since March 2006. (FT)

• World stock markets tumbled Thursday, with benchmarks in Tokyo and Seoul losing almost 7 percent each. (AP)• Five years after Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke helped stamp out the risk of deflation, the threat is returning as the financial crisis and a worsening economic slump pull inflation lower. (Bloomberg)• The RBA said in a monthly bulletin today that it bought A$3.15 billion ($2 billion) of its own currency last month, the biggest net purchase on record, as the local dollar posted a record monthly decline. • U.S. options

...

A few years ago, RA had a series of blog posts arguing that in terms of geopolitical interests, energy, and simple geography, Washington and Tehran could find that they have much more in common than the fiery and hostile diplomacy (or lack thereof) might dictate. Russia's mild protection of Iran from sanctions in the UN represents not a true alliance or mutually rewarding friendship, but rather the maintenance of a "swing position" whereby Moscow can ensure that Iran and the United States continue to have poor relations, and especially prevent Iran's natural gas sector from developing into a competing supplier to Gazprom (enormous amounts of foreign capital are required). Indeed, many policy analysts have explicitly identified the urgency of including Iranian supply in order to make the Nabucco pipeline a possibility (not that Dick Cheney understands this...). ...

One would think that Azeri President Ilham Aliyev would be pretty pleased to receive Vice President Dick Cheney's official delegation a few weeks ago - it was after all the highest ranking U.S. politician to ever visit the country. However that's not quite how it played out. Amid numerous reports that the meetings in Baku were cool if not cold, Aliyev additionally snubbed Cheney by not showing up to the airport to welcome him, and then immediately telephoned Medvedev right after their meeting to explain what the U.S. energy strategy is for the region. This made the mercurial vice president so angry that he apparently skipped town on a dinner to be held in his honor. The Russian press has been having a field day parading the "failure" of the Cheney delegation to hardball the Azeris into energy supply commitments ...

One would think that Azeri President Ilham Aliyev would be pretty pleased to receive Vice President Dick Cheney's official delegation a few weeks ago - it was after all the highest ranking U.S. politician to ever visit the country. However that's not quite how it played out. Amid numerous reports that the meetings in Baku were cool if not cold, Aliyev additionally snubbed Cheney by not showing up to the airport to welcome him, and then immediately telephoned Medvedev right after their meeting to explain what the U.S. energy strategy is for the region. This made the mercurial vice president so angry that he apparently skipped town on a dinner to be held in his honor. The Russian press has been having a field day parading the "failure" of the Cheney delegation to hardball the Azeris into energy supply commitments ...

If you need more proof that the US lost the Cold War to Russia and China you need look no further than Venezuela, says emerging markets expert Irwin Greenstein, writing for Contrarian Profit. Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, inked two significant energy deals with China and Russia that will divert American oil to our former Cold War adversaries.

What further proof do we need that we lost the Cold War than to have China and Russia take over critical oil supplies right in our own backyard?

Americans like to believe that the 40-odd-year Cold War drew to a close in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. That’s when Ronald Regan was president and the Berlin Wall came tumbling down and the Soviet Union collapsed. (That led Dick Cheney to also tout Reagan’s famous fiscal theory that deficits don’t matter.)

With the …