White House Spokesman Made Foolish Market Prediction

Back on March 18, 2014, someone made a horrible prediction of the Russian stock market. 
“I wouldn’t, if I were you, invest in Russian equities right now—unless you’re going short,”
President Barack Obama’s chief spokesman, Jay Carney.  Obama was being pressured by Putin and I guess "unofficially" it was ok for anyone to say bad things about Russia's future just because our leader was generally-kinda-negative-ish towards Putin.  Groupthink?  Maybe.....probably.

Stupid prediction!

First of all, you can't predict stuff and you should not give investment advice if that is not even your role.  This dude did both.  When he made that comment, Russia's MICEX market index was almost 35% off its previous high after the 2008 recession.  Sounds like a time to buy to me.  I start buying around 30% off.  That's when things are on sale.  Their market was fairly volatile for a few years leading up to that point.  Price was bouncing around in a pretty flat but wide channel.  So I would have strongly disagreed with Jay Carney at the time.  Then to make him look really bad, MICEX never went lower and eventually reached all new highs as of this week.  That would have been a nice 2 year trade for me.  I would have bought around 1300, sold around 1800.  Today, MICEX is at 1977 and its knockin on resistance.

The Nice Port

Imagine this: 

There is a country which will not be able to pay its debts and his hoping for a bailout from a larger country or a bankruptcy type of restructuring to spread things out.

fiscal management is considered a disaster

the country is small and is being compared to Detroit.

a politician from this country now authorizes a budget which takes money away from things such as education and not only overfunds public pensions (to pay your friends) but gives the President's wife a $2.5 million incidental allowance so she can 'get by' and pay for 'necessities'?

Surprise!  Its all true.  Puerto Rico is the winner....yay....