Posted on 04/27/2014 8:02:15 AM PDT by No One Special
Whenever the horrifyingly precarious fundamentals of the Russian economy are pointed out to its apologists, the response is always the same. “Russia has low debt and high reserves, so it can weather any storm,” they chant, and the melody of the anthem of the USSR can be heard in the background.
This is the opposite of the truth. Far from being a strength, debt and reserves are Russia’s main Achilles heels. In Ukraine, they may prove Russia’s undoing.
Russia came under withering economic fire last week as it geared up for a broader war of aggression in Ukraine. Its stock market lost over 5% of its value, crashing through the 1300 barrier on the MICEX exchange, and the U.S. treasury secretary boldly stated that the U.S. would target Vladimir Putin’s personal assets if he launched an attack. S&P downgraded Russia’s credit rating due to massive capital flight, and every day that passed brought new revelations about measures at U.S. disposal to wreck havoc in the Russian banking sector.
World leaders piled on Putin with genuine zeal. The secretary-general of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation called Putin a “ridiculous hypocrite,” and the U.S. secretary of state called Putin a liar and a cheat who had “refused to take a single step” to de-escalate the Ukraine crisis. Russia found itself in the world’s financial cross hairs, with few defensive measures available in response. The Russian Central Bank panicked at the prospect of runaway inflation and clamped down hard, risking putting the economy into a death spiral as loans dry up and growth peters out.
As the Russia economics guru Anders Aslund points out, it’s simply mythology to imagine that Russia’s currency reserves are squirreled...
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
That’s...pretty funny.
Putin is exercising his sovereign rights over unsettled internal issues from the 90s, our POtuS is destroying 100 years of across-the-board gains of the American people and suddenly Russia is better than the US to Manuel Noriega.
Oops...oh my gosh...did I actually compare Panama to Ukraine.
I’m gonna get it now...
/s
Okay, you wait till you can see his bank book. LOL.
Sorry but I sure don’t understand your post.
I don't think they had that chance in the 2000s under the oligarchs. Putin provided them the self-pride they wanted.
Russia did not have the advantages of China. China has a far stronger economy and in the 90s was strongly held, while Russia did not have that advantage
Russian society is not so defective to be non-democratic --> why do you say so?
If you need Putin to feel proud, you may not have self-respect, respect for others, common decency, a sense that no man is above the law, an ignorance of how much more important the individual is than the state, and an irrational longing for autocracy. Those are just a few obvious points. You may not have learned the lessons of autocracy under the Czars and the communist either.
70+ years of godless Communism will do that to a country, it will take generations for Russia to recover from it. Not that the Tsars were all that great, neither.
Aspirin, ibupropin, vice grips, panty hose and on and on and on
Maybe. Maybe that’s the reason that don’t value liberty and prefer an autocrat. It’s part of their custom. Why we have political pilgrims of the left who run off to all the left wing dictators and sing their praises, and why we have folks on the right who fawn over rightist autocrats is also worth exploring. All the goals we want are not going to occur in the long run and for a sustained period of time if in the course of pursuing those goals the process becomes undemocratic.
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