Executive Summary

• Why the Ukraine was a predictable flashpoint
• The IMF's "help" is about to make the Ukranian situation a lot worse
• What we can learn and how this relates to relocating within or outside of your home country
• Chris' "must have" ingredients that make a potential relocation destination worth considering

If you have not yet read Rising Resource Costs Escalate Odds of Global Unrest, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

Ukraine

Now back to that 'veteran reader's (davefairtex's) original series of questions. Ukraine was primed and ready for a shove into instability.

There’s a well known psychology experiment where two male rats can be placed in a cage where they will live somewhat happily as long as they have sufficient food. However, if painful electric shocks are applied to the floor of the cage in such a way that the rats cannot escape the shocks, the two males will begin fighting.

Keep up the shocks long enough and the fighting will be severe, even to the death.

What’s happening? The rats lack the context to know that the shocks are coming from outside somewhere. The only thing they can project their discomfort onto is the only other living thing in their sight – the other rat.  It must be his fault!

So they fight.

Similarly, the people of Ukraine lack the context to know just who is to blame for the unpleasant conditions in which they live and seemingly cannot escape. So they