Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is tapping Wall Street firms like BlackRock and JPMorgan to help garner private and public investments to rebuild Ukraine amid its war with Russia.
Through the Ukraine Development Fund, BlackRock and JPMorgan will “mobilize capital from private and public sector investors toward rebuilding the Ukrainian economy,” according to CNN, as financial investors admit they see the fund as a lucrative windfall.
CNN reports:
Private investors see a “tremendous opportunity” to invest in Ukraine’s post-war future, according to Stefan Weiler, JPMorgan’s head of debt capital markets for central and eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. [Emphasis added]
…
It’s an opportunity to “socialize” the idea of the fund and its mission, which is to “attract as much private sector capital into the reconstruction of Ukraine as possible,” said Brandon Hall, co-head of BlackRock’s Financial Markets Advisory arm. [Emphasis added]
Wall Street’s involvement in helping to rebuild Ukraine comes as journalist James O’Keefe published footage of BlackRock employee Serge Varlay saying the country’s war with Russia is “good for business”
“I’ll give an example: Russia blows up Ukraine’s grain silos. The price of wheat is gonna go mad up … the Ukrainian economy is tied very largely to the wheat market, global wheat market,” Varlay said. “Prices of bread, you know, literally everything goes up and down. This is fantastic if you’re trading.”
“Volatility creates opportunity to make profit … war is real fucking good for business,” Varlay continued.
American taxpayers, specifically, have funded Ukraine’s war with Russia to the sum of billions — making the war especially profitable for Department of Defense contractors like Raytheon Technologies, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman.
Since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, the Defense Department had estimated that it sent nearly $41 billion in taxpayer money to aid Ukraine.
This week, though, agency officials said they made a $6.2 billion “misevaluation.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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