Marko Papic - A Multi-Polar World

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
This episode is sponsored by Tegus. Tegus is the new digital hub for market intelligence. The Tegus platform empowers investors and corporate development teams to invest smarter by pairing best-in-class technology with the highest quality user-generated content and data. Tegus content is powered by many of the world's leading institutional investors, where their expert calls are recorded, transcribed, and uploaded to the shared platform, leading to the highest quality content and datasets.
Tegus also recently acquired BAMSEC, which will allow users to seamlessly toggle between financial data, management commentary, and expert interviews as they get up to speed on a company.
Any customer who signs up for Tegus before May 31st will receive a free BAMSEC license as part of their subscription. Find out why a majority of top firms are using Tegus on a daily basis. Head to tegus.com/patrick for your free trial. Stay tuned after the episode to hear my interview with Tegus and BAMSEC customer Steve White from SW Investments. We cover how Steve incorporates both Tegus and BAMSEC across his investment process. This episode is brought to you by lemon.io. The team at lemon.io has built a network of Eastern European developers ready to pair with fast growing startups. We have faced challenges hiring engineering talent for various projects and lemon.io offered developers for one-off projects, developers for full start to finish product development or developers that could be add-ons to an existing team. Check out lemon.io/patrick to learn more.
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all our podcasts including edited transcripts, show notes and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:54)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:18)
My guest today is Marko Papic, partner and chief strategist at Clocktower Group, where he leads the firm's research on macroeconomics and markets. Marko has spent his career at the intersection of finance and geopolitics, making him a perfect person to speak to about current events in Ukraine and their potential impact further afield. Along with Russia and Ukraine, we discussed the Fed, inflation, China, the green energy transition and the US's position in the global order. Please enjoy this discussion with Marko Papic.
So, Marko, maybe the appropriate place to begin, I guess we kind of have to, given what's going on in the world, is just with your up-to-date, we're recording on March 8th, 2022, your sort of current snapshot of what is happening in Ukraine, Russia, and how it has evolved in the first 10 to 14 days or so of the conflict. I want to start there because it's the most important thing happening in the world, but then obviously spend a ton of time talking through near-term and long-term investing and economic implications of what's happening. But let's orient the audience by you describing sort of your interpretation of what's happened so far.

**Marko Papic** (3:22)
Let me give you a figure before we begin there.
In the first year of the war in Iraq in 2003, US lost about 500 troops.
According to the Russian Defense Ministry, so this is like Russian official data, they lost about 500 troops in the first five days of the war.
Now you can multiply that by some sort of a coefficient that adjusts for their propaganda. The fact of the matter is that the first thing I want to talk about is the failures of Russia and Ukraine. That were, by the way, telegraphed by some obvious material constraints we can talk about later. But I'm just going to outline some of the things that have happened thus far. First, they've conducted this multi-pronged attack that has basically divided their forces.
It's eight lines of attack. It's almost performative art. It's like watching a Bolshoi theater performance.
It's performative. Fabius Assault, Mario Pol, paratroopers, multiple lines of attack. I mean, it's idiotic. I mean, that's the only way I can describe it. And I've studied war for a long time in my career. The US and Iraq had two lines of attack. They both went from the south. Second, they conducted zero sad operations, suppression of enemy air defense. Just didn't do it. They were like, YOLO, let's roll in with the tanks. We're good. That was really stupid because Ukraine has a really sophisticated air defense capability that like Moscow paid for during the Cold War. So that wasn't smart. Their cyber capabilities are poultry. And they've now revealed that to the world. I mean, they're fighting a war with a country and they basically hack their websites. Like, oh, no. On top of that, you've got the fact that they invaded a country the size of Germany, the UK and forgot to supply them with stuff.