Demand for Russian speakers

[Renee Stillings | Alinga]

Dear Seelangers:

In case any of you missed this article below (thank Johnson's List), it makes an interesting and easy to miss side note about an area of demand for Russian speakers - on Wall street. In general, areas of finance and investment is one area that should be brought to the attention of students as having job opportunities related to Russia. Another area is in accounting. Russia is already implementing requirements for IAS reporting by Russian companies - when there is an extreme shortage  of experts knowledgeable in this area in Russia.

Besides, I think your students might find the links indicated here interesting reading - in either language.

Renee

***

#6
The Guardian (UK)
April 7, 2003
There is really on one source of reliable information on this war - and
it's coming from Russian spies 
By John Sutherland

Every day, as the war rages, there are winners and losers. Not just on the
battlefield, but in the stock market. The indexes and the exchange rates
swing wildly as euphoric Pentagon briefings ("Basra is Ours!", "Victory in
Days!") turn sour. 

The Dow Jones is 200 up on today's headlines, 200 down on tomorrow's.
Currencies soar and crash with every Qatar press briefing. Truth is not the
first casualty of current war reporting, it's the daily casualty. Place
your stock-market bets according to CNN and you'll be broke in a week. 

Successful traders nowadays do not rely on hunches. They use the
mathematical and computing skills of the best brains they can hire. Nerds
rule. They crunch numbers and create dynamic models that allow them to
shave tiny profits off the marginal and fleeting fluctuations of stocks and
currencies. 

The fluctuations have never been more volatile than in the past couple of
weeks. Guess right and get rich. But, as one mathematician trader put it to
me: "How can I model madness?" He went on to give the answer. 

You don't factor news into your model, but intelligence. There is a surfeit
of war news, but reliable intelligence is hard to come by. The canny trader
in these parlous days has a first port of call - GRU (Glavnoye
Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye), the espionage arm of the Russian military. 

GRU is the most sophisticated agency of its kind in the world. And, since
Glasnost, the most transparent. GRU has thousands of agents worldwide
(especially in countries such as Iraq, where Russia has traditional trade
links). Intelligence has always been a top priority for Ivan. The number of
agents operated by the GRU during the Soviet era was six times the number
of agents operated by the KGB. 

Russia, superpower that it was, still has spy satellites, state-of-the-art
interception technology and (unlike the CIA) men on the ground. The beauty
of GRU is that it does not (like the CIA) report directly to the leadership
but to the Russian ministry of defence. In its wisdom, it makes its
analyses publicly available. These are digested as daily bulletins on
www.iraqwar.ru. 

The Russians have a contrarian view on the current conflict. What was it
Kissinger said about the Iran-Iraq war - "Ideally we'd like both sides to
lose"? That's what the Kremlin thinks about Operation Free Iraq. 

>From its neutral stance, GRU offers detailed, top-grade, and wholly unspun
analysis. The bulletins are in Russian (bilingualism is suddenly in demand
on Wall Street). You can get English translations a day later on Venik's
Aviation website (www.aeronautics.ru). 

Excellent as Suzanne Goldenberg's dispatches and Dan Chung's pictures are,
anyone who wants to know what is really going on at the gates of Baghdad
should click on to Venik (it's a pseudonym) before reading their newspaper.
Check it out. GRU has been absolutely right about every pendulum swing in
the fighting. It gave, for example, the true picture of the ambiguous
on-off "occupation" of Basra as it happened. Traders made a killing using
that GRU intelligence intelligently rather than sucking up the generals'
lies and politicians' spin. 

On GRU you will find the sobering information that the supply of Tomahawk
missiles on US warships is at 25% "criticality" level (the arsenal they
have to reserve for the North Koreans). The US can't bomb smart any more. 

Pity Baghdad 

There are other sources of high-grade intelligence available to the trader
wanting to be two days' head-up on the opposition. You can buy bootlegged
Chinese intelligence reports in Hong Kong (apparently the Chinese have
bought that downed Apache helicopter the Iraqis were dancing on) and
Israeli analysis in Tel Aviv. 

But why waste money when the Russians are giving away the best stuff free?
Invest intelligently and get rich. 

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