This NY Times article reports on the Russian government’s removal of the final restrictions on foreign equity investment in the state-controlled Gazprom, which is Russia’s natural gas monopoly, Russia’s largest company and the producer of a third of the world’s supply of natural gas. Analysts who follow Russian energy markets are predicting that the company will double in value in the next year or two after President Putin signed a decree last week lifting a 20 percent cap on foreign ownership and a prohibition on nonresidents owning shares traded on Russian domestic stock exchanges.
Meanwhile, in case you feel particularly enthusiastic about making that bet, this London Telegraph article reminds us of one of the more knotty risks of investing in Russian companies:

A former top executive in Russian oil giant Yukos, who is wanted by the Russian government to face fraud charges, will not be extradited, a [UK] judge ruled yesterday.

Interestingly, it’s a good thing that executive was not an executive for a UK bank doing business in the U.S.

This earlier post from a year and a half ago checked in on Ft. Worth billionaire Richard Rainwater and his typically contrarian bet on the telecommunications industry. Following on that theme, this recent Oliver Ryan/Fortune article catches up with Rainwater, who continues to live quietly in Ft. Worth with his wife, Darla Moore, the former Chemical Bank bankruptcy-financing star. Rainwater aptly describes his investment strategy as follows: “Most people invest and then sit around worrying what the next blowup will be. I do the opposite. I wait for the blowup, then invest.”
Rainwater, who is currently sitting on about half a billion of cash, is refining his contrarian investment perspective:

The next blowup, however, looms so large that it scares and confuses him. For the past few months he’s been holed up in hard-core research modeóreading books, academic studies, and, yes, blogs. Every morning he rises before dawn at one of his houses in Texas or South Carolina or California (he actually owns a piece of Pebble Beach Resorts) and spends four or five hours reading sites like LifeAftertheOilCrash.net or DieOff.org, obsessively following links and sifting through data. How worried is he? . . . “I’m long oil and I’m liquid,” he says. “I’ve put myself in a position that if the end of the world came tomorrow I’d kind of be prepared.” . . . This is the first scenario I’ve seen where I question the survivability of mankind. I don’t want the world to wake up one day and say, ‘How come some doofus billionaire in Texas made all this money by being aware of this, and why didn’t someone tell us?'”

Rainwater has had his share of missed bets, although his successful ones far exceed the failed ones. His wife jokingly calls him “Dr. Doom,” but he is no crackpot, so take a moment to read the entire interesting piece.

This earlier post on General Motors’ descent into a possible (probable?) bankruptcy case speculated that car buyers would be relunctant to make a long-term purchase of an asset from a bankrupt company. Related posts on GM’s financial problems are here.
Backing up that speculation is this Autoblog post noting that only 26% of those polled in a recent Directions Research Inc. survey of over 1,000 randomly-selected adults said that they would purchase or lease a new car from an automaker that had gone into the tank. Lower-income buyers said that they were less likely than more affluent buyers to buy a car from a bankrupt automaker as just 20% of those earning under $25,000 a year would buy or lease a car from a debtor-automaker while almost a third of those earning more than $100,000 said that they would do so.
GM appears to be lurching to that most unfortunate position of needing to wash through a reorganization case, but not being in a position to afford the cost of the financial cleansing.
Meanwhile, the “B” word is a prominent part of this recent interview with GM CEO, Rick Wagoner.