Will Armenia be center stage for the conflict between Russia and Turkey?

Azerbaijan has been gearing up to recapture Nagorno Karabakh from Armenia. It now spends more on defense than the entire Armenian budget. Here are two paragraphs from a recent article:

Azerbaijan's government has consistently bragged about its defense budget, which, starting in 2011, it claimed exceeded Armenia's entire state budget. Azerbaijan's Foreign Ministry spokesman Hikmat Hajiyev told the American newspaper Defense News in a story published this week that that "defense spending had enabled the Azerbaijani armed forces to be supplied with requisite advanced weaponry needed to re-take 
'its Armenian-held territories.'"

“It is our priority and we will continue to increase military spending," said Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev in 2014. "Over the past 10 years, our military spending has increased more than 20-fold, and our spending allocated to the armed forces is approximately twice as large as Armenia’s overall state budget."

The drop in oil prices means that this level of spending cannot be sustained, so the time to act is now. Russia has a base in Armenia that is a potential threat to Turkey. President Erdogan of Turkey, who may be one of the most dangerous men in the world with his dreams of the restoration of the Ottoman Empire, said, “We pray our Azerbaijani brothers will prevail in these clashes.” Azerbaijan would not have attacked without Turkey's acquiescence.

Will Armenia be center stage for the conflict between Russia and Turkey?

Separated at birth: Russian gold reserves and Switzerland's 5000 franc bill

I recently read (WSJ, 2/23/16, C2) that demand for the CHF 1000 note, currently Switzerland's largest denomination, has been increasing as Swiss central bank rates have turned negative. This raises the fear that local depositors will soon be charged for storing their money in banks. There are now CHF 45.2 bn (US$45.7 bn) in circulation, a 17% increase in the last twelve months.

Two gnome-like parliamentarians from Zug, near Zurich zeroed in on this and proposed that the SNB also Issue CHF 5000 notes, arguing that "an individual's ability to keep wealth stockpiled in cash, and out of the reach of banks, digital payment systems or the government, is a fundamental right." (WSJ's paraphrase)

Meanwhile back in the Kremlin, Bank of Russia President Elvira Nabuillina, a Tartar and worthy scion of the Golden Horde, whom Euromoney has named Central Banker of the Year in 2015, is buying all the gold she can get her hands on. (Well, almost all) In the fourth quarter, the Bank was reportedly the world's largest single buyer of gold, and in January alone it added another 700,000 ounces ($840 mn). Russia's concern is that by holding dollars in reserve it risks having them effectively cancelled by denial of access to the international transfer system, which is the only way these ones and zeroes in the their computer have any value. It is interesting that the Zug solons also expressed concern for digital payment systems in arguing for the CHF 5000 bill. (By the way, one of the ideas discussed last year by the US authorities was to close the payment system to Russia to force them to default on their external debts, which are mainly corporate, thus strewing chaos; international creditors did not like this idea, however.)

Money is a means of exchange and a store of value. In the dollar world, both of these functions are available at the pleasure, and only at the pleasure of the Fed and the US Treasury. That is why politics worry some and "unconventional policies" worry others.