Re:
del1962 said:
Getting back to Vlad, his real problem isn't the Ukraine or US but the price of oil, he has an economy that is based on oil and with the drop Russia is in an economic crisis
vlad has to deal with great many problems concurrently...oil is but one.
depending on a source, i saw such numbers as btwn 30 to 50% of his state budget income is natural gas and oil based. the oil price dropping by about one half means tens of billions of the us dollars have to be either:
- borrowed,
-cut out of the budget expenditures
-injected from the sovereign reserves of currency and gold, or
some mix of the above
due to the west's sanctions and the ruble meltdown, their borrowing on the world financial markets is almost non-existent (with the small exception of china). the internal borrowing via issuing domestic bonds is also highly limited b/c their inflation has jumped from 7 to 15% and is heading higher. thus in the practical sense, vlad oly has the last 2 options - cutting expenditures and going for his reserves.
cutting expenditures is highly risky in terms of vlad's grip on power. their economy's is still largely based on the state-subsidized almost everything - from medicine, to bread, to education....to be factual, they do have some real market economy and the raising enterprising middle class. but due to high corruption and the weak banking system, it is the state corporation like gazprom that everyone wants to join rather than risk and dare..so, vlad cut the budget just a little.
this leaves the reserves as the only practical fallback option. and in this regard, they are so huge (the estimates vary from 500 billion us $$ to over a trillion) that vlad can maneuver in the low oil price environment for several years. this CRITICAL aspect is either grossly misunderstood or deliberately misreported. in fact, vlad is so sure that while cutting his own budget, he had slated tens of billions on such political-economic initiatives as the BRICKS bank (an alternative to imf), loans to his allies (belarus, armenia etc) AND even trying to woo Greece (their pm plans 3 visits to moscow btwn now and april).
as usual, the picture peddled by the western msm is to demonise a political enemy as opposed to trying to break the problem down for the inquisitive readers.
but one thing we can be sure of - while russia had showed itself quite capable of learning in the military an scientific fields - it performed atrociously (almost always) in the economic learning (and practical) field. thus, if vlad does not force out the bad habit, he will going down together with his nation.