Russia
The frames disagree, which is the interesting case: the quadrant is hostile but the balance sheet is not — this is a bad environment for a country that can still afford one.
Top — early debt cycle
Debt at 18% of GDP, mixed. Rates high & stable.
Inflationary Bust — recession with inflation
Hold Cash in a serious currency. Short duration. Energy. Eliminate Long bonds and long-duration growth equities. Both get destroyed.
Antifragile — moves 100, danger 42
Gains value when volatility rises. Wants the world to move.
Heading towardInflationary Bust(low confidence)
War economy. Oil revenue still flowing despite sanctions. 21% rates crush private sector. Uninvestable for Western capital.
Europe · Updated 2026-06-05
Where in the cycle
Countries follow a long arc — building strength, peaking, declining under their own debts, then resetting and starting again. It takes centuries, and the same investment behaves completely differently depending on which part of the arc a country is standing on.
At or near the top. The strengths are intact but the debt is starting to set the agenda. Debt at 18% of GDP, owed to a mix of domestic and foreign holders. Long-term debt cycle still has room.
Which quadrant
Two questions describe the whole environment: is the economy growing, and are prices rising? Answer both and you land in one of four boxes, and each box rewards owning something different.
The answers come from market prices rather than government statistics, because statistics get revised and massaged. Growth is measured by the country’s stock index divided by the oil price — if companies are outrunning the energy they burn, the economy is working. Inflation is measured by gold divided by that country’s own government bonds — when savers move from the state’s money into the metal nobody can print, they are telling you something. Both are averaged over seven years, so the reading turns only a few times a decade.
MOEX / oil
MOEX / oil is unreadable from outside — capital controls and sanctions mean the price is not a free market price.
Gold / Russia 10Y OFZ
Gold / OFZ is not investable for Western capital at any price. Included for completeness of the map, not as an idea.
RUB sanctioned, not convertible for Westerners
Sanctioned, capital trapped, default on foreign holders
MOEX closed to Western investors since 2022
Sanctions, capital controls, impossible to exit
Gave manages by exclusion, not inclusion — it is far easier to know what will fall than what will rise, so the work is throwing horses out of the race rather than picking the winner.
Danger, not risk
Two different things get called risk. One is how much the price jumps around, which is noise you can wait out if you are not forced to sell. The other is the chance the money never comes back at all. They are separate, and they often point in opposite directions — an Argentine government bond barely moved in price and went to zero nine times.
This question gets asked twice: once of the country, and again of each instrument you might buy inside it. A sound economy can still contain a lethal holding, and a country in trouble can contain perfectly durable ones.
Middling on both axes. Size it on conviction, not on comfort.
The weather above narrowed it to a class. This narrows it to a holding. Same two axes, asked of the instrument instead of the economy — how much does it move, and can it go to zero? Everything below is what inflationary bust rewards; where each one sits is how much danger you would be carrying to own it.
Energy producers
moves 55 · danger 14
Companies that pull oil, gas and power out of the ground and sell it.
Double merit: they profit from the exact shock that damages everything else you own, and they pay large dividends, which shortens how far into the future you are betting.
Gold
moves 34 · danger 4
Metal. Nobody issued it, so nobody can print more or default on it.
Property rather than a promise. Central banks have been buying it in size, and the 2022 reserve freeze demonstrated the one property no custodied asset has: it cannot be switched off.
Short bills, serious currency
moves 11 · danger 4
Very short loans to a solid government — Swiss, Singaporean, Norwegian.
Cash with a yield, in a currency run by people who do not print. The right answer in the worst quadrant, and the closest thing here to genuinely dull.
Bitcoin
moves 80 · danger 20
A digital asset with a fixed supply that no state issues.
Only if you accept the premise that the thing strangers agree to accept is changing. Size it small enough that being wrong is survivable — the market-value ratio against gold gives a low single-digit percentage.
These are long-horizon judgements on the same 0–100 scales used for the countries, not figures computed from a return series. And they describe the instrument, not this country’s version of it — a share index is a different proposition in a state late in its cycle than in one early in it, which is what the reading above was for.
Inflationary Bust
The clearest illustration on this map of why danger and risk are different axes. Sovereign debt is only 18% of GDP — by conventional balance-sheet measures Russia looks safer than France. It is uninvestable, because the danger is confiscation and exclusion, which no debt ratio captures. The 2022 asset freeze is also the single best argument for holding gold outside the banking system.
- →Any sanctions resolution
- →Energy export routing and pricing
- →War trajectory
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