Finland's accountability bills and the blow-off

2026-10-13 · The rulebook · Finland's Ukraine accountability bills, Lemonides' blow-off call tested

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Finland commits by law to Ukraine's post-war architecture, and Charles Lemonides' late-stage blow-off call tested against our picture of a slow US de-rating.

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Finland's accountability bills and the blow-off

The two bills in Parliament

HE 188 and HE 189 of 2026 were submitted to the Finnish Parliament on 24 September. The first ratifies Finland's membership in the enlarged partial agreement establishing the Council of Europe's Special Tribunal on the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine. The second brings Finland into the International Claims Commission for Ukraine. They sit at the proposal stage, awaiting committee referral.

Nothing material lands at the referral step itself, but it is where the depth of the commitment gets answered. If the tribunal bill is sent to the Legal Affairs Committee rather than Foreign Affairs, Finland is preparing to engage with the prosecution infrastructure, not just signing a diplomatic text. The claims commission is the more market-relevant of the two: when it enters into force Finland acquires both a reporting obligation and a probable funding share in the mechanism that will adjudicate Ukrainian reparations claims.

The read on Finnish industrial beneficiaries of reconstruction does not change on a tribunal ratification; it changes on an actual award, years away, or on a public tender funded by frozen Russian assets, which is a separate political fight. The level that would change the structural read is Legal Affairs being named lead with a funding footnote attached. What would reduce this to a diplomatic signature is both bills parked in Foreign Affairs with no funding footnote.

Lemonides' blow-off call, tested

Charles Lemonides, Chief Investment Officer of ValueWorks, argued on Monetary Matters with Jack Farley that we are in the eighteenth year of a bull market without a 25 per cent correction, and that the final blow-off phase could run another two to five years before terminating. His claim is that late-stage blow-offs generate the biggest returns before the cycle ends — a horizon call, not a judgement on where valuations sit now.

Our standing view is that the broad US index settles lower over the next nine months as stretched valuations meet a hiking Fed and a long end near multi-year highs. The disagreement is on mechanism, not horizon. His two-to-five-year window is directionally compatible with our picture of a slow index-level de-rating under the surface rather than a sharp break — the headline level held up by a few names while the breadth underneath thins. Neither picture is compatible with adding at the top.

Bravos Research sharpens the funding-side mechanism. The mechanical competition for capital between sovereign borrowing and hyperscaler AI debt pushes the real yield at which US technology names are discounted higher before it resets lower. Their 1940s-style debasement endpoint is where we part — the Fed is still hiking into sticky inflation, not capping yields. Lemonides reads sector fundamentals, which are intact. Bravos reads the funding cost, which is deteriorating. Over nine to eighteen months the funding cost wins.

The case for adding US equity at these valuations is not there. The case for cutting on Lemonides' picture alone is also not there — he is not forecasting a break, and neither are we. The convergence that would move the read is high-yield spreads crossing 400 basis points while the equal-weighted index underperforms the cap-weighted by more than 3 per cent over four weeks. Spreads today are at 3.15. The move has not started.

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