FIona Hill writes: In Ukraine, and in his whistle-stop trip to Hungary, Putin is out to score points for Russia. He is not out to win friends in Ukraine or Europe. Nor is he out to restore a Russian empire, or build a new Moscow-centric geopolitical order. Putin wants respect for Russia, not external obligations. He wants respect in the old-fashioned, hard-power sense of the word.

Putin is a practitioner of realpolitik in its starkest form. In his interactions with regional leaders, Putin has laid out his view that all the states that emerged from the USSR are appendages of Russia. They should pay fealty to Moscow. Other European countries, including the former great powers of France, Germany and the UK, are satellites of the United States, grouped under the umbrella of NATO and the European Union. The unaligned operate in the shadows of two blocs, as Putin put it once to Georgian leaders. The only open question for Putin is who gets to decide the final borders of his new Yalta, Russia or the United States. The future of Ukraine and the Donbas are one set of decision points. Elsewhere, Russia has announced it will lift border controls between Russia and Georgia’s separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia; and Putin is questioning other borders in the Soviet Union’s old stomping grounds in the Baltics and Eastern Europe. He is challenging the European Union’s frontiers by appealing to eastern Orthodox countries like Greece and Cyprus, where politicians and populations feel aggrieved at their treatment by the austere Protestant powers of northern Europe who set the tone for European economic reform.

Redrawing borders in Crimea was Putin’s first major victory. Putin has long expressed his personal sense of humiliation when Russia lost its geopolitical position in Europe with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Twenty-five years later, Putin told the world Russia was no longer in retreat.

Right now the West looks weak to Putin. In his view, the tables have been turned. The eurozone crisis has undermined the European Union politically and economically. The United States is overextended after more than a decade of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and seems incapable of dealing with crises in the Middle East. China is the dominant player in East Asia. Putin is taking full advantage of the situation, snubbing his nose at sanctions and running rings around European diplomats who are anxious to end the war in Ukraine. He has rallied the population at home with emotional evocations of Russian imperial glories, Soviet nostalgia and the idea of a unique “Russian world.” He has depicted himself as the leader of an international coalition of conservative politicians and states confronting the excesses of a decadent West. Russian history, imperial nostalgia, religion and values have all proven potent instruments for Putin to reassert Russia’s position.

With no endgame in sight in Ukraine, Putin is now focusing on the European arena.

Michael Bloomberg calls for a Solomoic decision on the Keystone Pipeline.  He points out that Democats exaggerate its environmental mpact, Repubican its economic impact.  He calls on Preisdent Obama to go to Canada on a diplomatic mission and settle this matter.

Bloomberg is right and this moment after Obama’s veto gives Obama an opening.  Secretary of State Kerry has been doing such a good job that Obama would be wise to involve him.

US oil independence depends on Canada, one of our closest allies.  A big climate conference in December is going to make both the US and Canada, who rank low on cleaning up the environment, look very bad if they don’t act.  The Queen of Sheba could have solved this problem as well as Solomon.

Former Rep. Henry Waxman, who has tangled with industries including Big Tobacco, Big Coal and Big Pharma, thought his congressional experience would position him to help a large law firm advise corporations.

As his retirement from Congress neared, he wrote a business plan, sent it to public-policy group managers and talked to peers who’d preceded him in private practice. A lawyer before he entered Congress 40 years ago, Waxman believed he could “give good counsel to people who have issues that I could help them think through.”

But after more than a month of searching, the fifth most senior Democrat in the U.S. House has changed his mind. K Street, it seems, isn’t for everyone.

Waxman had run up against the contradictions many politicians face when they leave Capitol Hill. He felt comfortable as an advocate, but didn’t want to lobby. He would work hard, but not full-time. He could advise companies, but not be a hired gun to any paying customer.

Few large general-service firms with public policy shops fit this ideal. The firms serve companies across many industries and can be sensitive about offending those clients. And Waxman’s résumé read like a hit list of corporate America.

As a past chairman of the House Oversight Committee and of the Energy and Commerce Committee, he was a force behind passage of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments, which targeted coal power plant emissions; the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act; and the Affordable Care Act.

Even the Hatch-Waxman Act—which Waxman in his business plan calls the “Waxman-Hatch” Act—cut away power and money from brand pharmaceutical companies. On the other hand, it empowered the generic drug industry.

The Chamber of Commerce gets more specific: Waxman voted in line with business interests only 27 percent of the time during his career. That places him among the 25 least business-friendly House members in office as of 2013, as defined by the Chamber.

Waxman said late last week that he would join his son Michael in  a four-person D.C. public relations company called Waxman Strategies.

Bidding typically is intense for former lawmakers in D.C. lobbying shops, with former senators going for at least $1 million and House members for about $500,000. “It’s a lot of money. That would be the great advantage. But money’s not everything,” Waxman said of the legal industry.

Waxman added: “I’m not changing my views. I’m proud of the work I’ve done and I want to continue working on things I think work well.”

Arash Karami writes: Ayatollah Rafsanjani head of Iran’s Expediency Council, has said that to resolve many of the issues plaguing the Middle East, there needs to be cooperation between the two regional rivals, Iran and Saudi Arabia. When Rafsanjani was asked about Iran-Saudi relations, he said that after statements by Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati about the passing of King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, “The situation became worse.”

Rafsanjani believes that relations with Saudi Arabia can be improved once again, just as they were after the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Rafsanjani said that after the 1979 revolution, relations with Riyadh deteriorated over Tehran’s desire to export the revolution and the Saudi support for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in the war. However, when he became president in 1989, then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini urged him to improve ties because Riyadh had banned Iranian pilgrims to Mecca, insisting citizens of a Muslim country must be able to go perform a religious duty.

The great Harvard economist Carmen Reinhart wrote a wonderful book with Kenneth Rogoff.  “This Time It’s Differnent.”  Over centuries it hasn’t been. And now it isn’t either.

Remember subprime?

It’s not that it’s back. It never left.

But this time is different.

Remember how low interest rates led investors into buying packaged, securitized boxes with black holes?

It’s not that that’s back. It never left.

But this time is different.

What’s different? Today I’ll tell you…

Shah Gilani notes:The new subprime buildup isn’t about credit-damaged borrowers taking out mortgages. And new securitized boxes aren’t being filled with mortgages.

This time is different because credit-impaired borrowers are buying autos, borrowing on newly minted credit cards and taking out personal, mostly unsecured, loans. This time, institutional investors, mutual funds and retail investors are buying pieces of packaged leveraged loans.

This time is different because the dice are different.

According to a recent report released today – compiled by credit-reporting firm Equifax Inc. for The Wall Street Journal – in the first 11 months of 2014, four out of 10 auto loans, credit cards and personal loans went to subprime borrowers with credit scores of less than 640. That’s 50 million loans for $189 billion, in 11 months.

Subprime lending has helped boost auto sales 59% since 2009. That’s why we’re seeing record auto sales – lenders are throwing record amounts of money at borrowers, especially subprime borrowers.

Like private equity companies and hedge funds and venture capital firms, are able to borrow at next to nothing and put that money out to work in the “free market.” There they look to maximize the yield they get on the loans they make.

These non-bank lenders play in different sandboxes. Some throw money at auto dealers, both new- and used-car shops, so anybody who comes in the door can get a loan, as long as they’re willing to pay sky-high interest rates. Some back lending sites, like LendingTree or Elevate, which help themselves and their backers by lending money at high rates.

In 2014 LendingTree upped the loans it made to borrowers with FICO scores of 500 to 619 by 761% over 2013. None of the loans were mortgages.

Elevate, for its part, lends out at annual interest rates from 36% to a mere 365%.

The New York Federal Reserve said last Tuesday that total household debt rose $306 billion in just the fourth quarter of 2014.

With so much of that debt being carried by subprime borrowers, something’s bound to break.

But not to worry.  Most of the debt that might turn rotten isn’t sitting on banks’ balance sheets. It’s in private hands. Or public hands, depending on which investors are backing private equity shops, hedge funds and VC firms – or, sometimes, as in a lot, the crap gets packaged and sold off to other yield-hungry “investors.”

Banks themselves are packaging some new, old stuff this time around. They’re making “leveraged loans” to companies whose balance sheets are leveraged up with debt already. Borrowers apparently like the leverage to sometimes speculate on their own businesses, maybe buy each other out, maybe pay their controlling masters’ fees, maybe pay dividends, maybe buy back their overpriced shares, maybe just pay off old debt with new debt.

But not to worry.

In other words, don’t worry, this time risks are being spread around, not to just the same people as before, but to new investors who just know this time is different.