Thread: Economic sanctions

Originally Posted by misskit

Amid reports this week that Russia has canceled its biggest air show, experts told The Moscow Times that there was little point in holding the International Air and Space Salon (MAKS) because the war in Ukraine and Western sanctions mean there will be so few foreign buyers present.

Also, it looks increasingly like they have jack shit worth buying.

17 Jun, 2023 05:34


HomeBusiness News


Western currencies losing grip on Russia – deputy economy minister


The dollar and the euro have lost their dominance in settlements following a US-led sanctions policy, a deputy economy minister has told RT

"The share of the US dollar and euro in Russia’s settlements slumped from 90% in early 2022 to less than 50% by the end of the year and will keep falling, Russian Deputy Minister of Economic Development Vladimir Ilyichev told RT on Friday.

The US dollar and euro are gradually losing global dominance as a Washington-led sanctions policy has prompted more countries around the world to shift to settlements in national currencies, he said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).

“In early 2022 the share of the dollar and euro in our trade turnover totaled almost 90%. By the end of the year, the share of these currencies dropped to 48%, with more than 50% of settlements being carried out in rubles and yuan. This year the trend will persist, as Western countries continue adopting sanctions packages,” Ilyichev said.

Russia started actively replacing the dollar and euro in its foreign settlements with other currencies last year and dramatically reduced the number of banking accounts and transactions between companies and financial institutions involving Western currencies.

Depending on various scenarios, the Russian Finance Ministry expects the share of the greenback and euro to diminish to 10-15% by year’s end, the deputy minister revealed. He noted that the share of the ruble in settlements between countries in the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) reached 75% in 2023.

“Outside the EEU and former Soviet countries, China and the Arab states are among those who are shifting away from the dollar more actively. We’ve reached substantial volumes of settlements in rupees with India,” the official stated.

Asian countries – including China – have emerged as key trade partners, with economic cooperation rapidly gaining momentum. Russia and China have accelerated the use of their own currencies in trade, which has benefitted both nations.

According to official figures, bilateral trade between China and Russia rose by over 34% year-on-year in 2022 – to a record high of $190 billion. Now, Moscow and Beijing have set a new trade goal of $300 billion by 2030, according to Ilyichev.

The official also revealed that Russia and Iran were at the final stages of a free trade agreement – one that “embraces all our trade” and is due to be signed as early as this year. The deal is expected to be excellent for Russian companies, as they would be exempted from Iran’s notoriously high export duties.

Similar free trade agreements are now being negotiated with the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Indonesia and are projected to come into force in a few years, Ilyichyov said."

Western currencies losing grip on Russia – deputy economy minister — RT Business News

Originally Posted by OhOh

Russia’s settlements

Have no money.

Originally Posted by OhOh

The US dollar and euro are gradually losing global dominance as a Washington-led sanctions policy has prompted more countries around the world to shift to settlements in national currencies, he said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).

More irrelevant ruzzian bullshit.

Yes but think of all that Iranian oil Russian can sneak out... and sell below market rate.

Yellen’s Daydream

By Michael Tuesday, June 20, 2023

Discussion by Michael Hudson with Kin Chi Lau, Global University, Hong Kong, June 5, 2023

"There’s a big dam on the Dnieper River that supplies all of the water to Crimea and they blow it up. Thousands of homes have been flooded. Naturally, the Ukrainians said the Russians did it. The reason that Crimea was assigned to Ukraine by Khrushchev in the 1960s was because the water and electricity area all came from the dam in the north of Crimea. All of that was blown up and flooded.

When you blow up a dam, imagine that was happening in China and how that would be blown up. That’s what happened. They blew it up. The dam on the Dnieper River that supplies water as well as electricity to Crimea was blown up. I think it wasn’t by a missile, it was launched by a naval mine that was shot, a kind of automatic bomb delivered electronically by a naval torpedo that blew it up. This has caused thousands of homes to have to be abandoned and knocked off the electricity grid.

The Dnieper is now much wider, so it will be harder for Ukraine to attack the Russians. It causes serious electricity and water problems for Crimea. Obviously, they’re trying to provoke Russia to do something violent, so when the NATO meeting occurs this weekend in Vilnius, they may have a full-fledged missile attack on Moscow and St. Petersburg and start World War III. That seems to be the intention.

They realize that the only kind of war that America can win is an atomic war. It doesn’t have troops of its own. It can’t mount an invasion. It can’t take over a country. All it can do is destroy. That’s the American policy.

This is a demonstration to China. What will happen to your dams if you insist in keeping China as one country and not doing as we recommend breaking China into five parts. If you try to keep controlling Xinjiang and other provinces, we’ll just have to blow up the dams and make sure that you’re not one country anymore. This is just like we’re doing in Ukraine for Russia. This seems to be the Western strategy.

In America, they said Russia doesn’t have any red lines. Again and again, Putin has said that this is a red line, that’s a red line, and yet he hasn’t done anything. A number of generals have given speeches this week, saying, “There is no red line for Russia, and we can see there’s no red line for China either. We’re sending our boats into the Straits of China, and China’s letting us send the boats right there. We can do anything we want.”

“We won’t let China come anywhere near the Caribbean, but we can go there. The fact is that China’s a paper tiger and Russia’s a paper tiger. They’re all but saying we’ve won. We can now just mop up and wipe out the enemy with atomic bombs or just take out all of their dams and their basic infrastructure.”

KC: Recently, there has been a lot of hawk talk from the generals in the States. Why do you think these hawkish talks from the generals have come up in the US?

It’s not from the generals. The generals have said that none of this is going to work. The hawkishness is from the politicians, from Biden and basically the neocons. It’s not from the military. The military have said they don’t see any way that Ukraine can win. And Biden and others, the State Department says, “Yes, you’re thinking of winning militarily, but that’s not how to think about it. If we blow up the dam, blow up the infrastructure, all we have to do is atom bomb Moscow and St. Petersburg and they’ll give in. And then China will give in because it’ll see we can do the same thing for it. We can win the whole world this weekend.” That’s the kind of talk you’re having among the neocons with the ‘cookies lady’ and the others, Victoria Nuland. None of this is from the generals.

KC: Do you think because now in the States they have finished the deal among the Republicans and the Democrats on the debt ceiling, they now would be turning more to the Ukraine and Taiwan?

No. I was on Chinese television two weeks ago, you were there. As I explained, this is simply a charade. There was never a debt problem, but it was presented nightly on the news, like a wrestling match between the good guy and the bad guy. And the pretense was that somehow the Congress had to come together and agree to remove the debt ceiling in order for Congress to pay for the programs that the Senate and Congress already had approved.

There was no debt crisis at all. That was simply an excuse to pretend there was one, so that they could cut back social spending in the United States, cut back the social programs for Medicaid and increase the oil pipeline.

By cutting off the social programs, once they agreed to that, the very next day, the Republican Senator from Maine, Susan Collins, said, “Now that everything has changed in the last 12 hours, now that there’s a war in Ukraine and Europe has used up all of its arms, we have to very sharply increase military spending by maybe 20 or 30 percent, a few trillion. So we’ve got to cut back the remaining programs in the United States. “

They’ve already cut back all money to fight COVID and to fight disease. All of that was emptied out as part of the deal, but none of that had to be done. It’s like a kind of sitcom or a television show where they make it appear as if a problem that has to be solved that isn’t a problem to begin with, that never was a problem. Isn’t that what I said when I was on television in China last week, didn’t they include that explanation?

KC: Yes, you said that and actually you were very correct when you talked about the student loans and all these cutbacks on the social welfare. Could you also briefly say what is happening now after the so-called resolution of the debt ceiling crisis? What are they actually trying to push forth?

Since there was no crisis and therefore nothing has happened, it’s just absolutely nothing. The only difference is they have approved the oil pipeline that the environmentalists fought. Biden has said America no longer has an environmental policy. The fuel of the future is oil and we’re controlling it, so America will not in practice be part of any environmental cleanup. We are not going to fight COVID. We’re just going to stop reporting the data.

These are things that were already happening. Nothing is particularly new at all. Congress is going to assign a huge amount to the military-industrial complex to produce arms to sell to Europe. America will pressure the European countries to buy American arms that will support the dollar very strongly against the euro.

The general view is that the euro is going to plunge. Now that Germany’s economy and German industry is pretty much wiped out, that was the main support for the euro’s exchange rate. Europe itself seems to be moving into a chronic recession or depression and a weakening currency.

Ashley: Last week, it was reported that Germany has already entered a recession, which is no surprise, given what’s been happening. So it’ll just intensify. Is that your expectation? It’ll just get worse for Germany and the rest of Europe.

Well, that was the intention. People keep thinking that America has been fighting Russia in the Ukraine. A few years ago, the American planners realized that there was no way that they can keep up with Eurasia’s development. How can they maintain American living standards a little longer while we’re not a manufacturing country anymore? The answer is, at least we can control Europe and make Europe into a colony, just as Europe made Africa and Latin America into colonies. The effect of this war has been America against Germany and Europe.

Russia has been the beneficiary so far. The sanctions have forced it to become much more self-sufficient, not only in food but in manufactures. Apparently, there is a flood of foreign investment into Russia to begin making the consumer goods and industrial products that were imported from Europe before. Russia is a beneficiary.

But if you look at who benefits and who suffers, you realize that it was not hard to see at the very beginning of the Ukraine war what was happening. In fact, I wrote from the very beginning that the objective was to subordinate Germany and Europe to the United States. That’s why the gas pipeline was blown up. That’s why America attacked Germany. But of course, Germany couldn’t say, “Well, we’re a NATO country, we’re attacked by America,” because NATO is America.

So there’s really nothing that Europe can do. It doesn’t have any political parties that really are for European independence in any way, as long as they all imagine that the threat is a Russian invasion – as if Russia had any interest at all in repeating the control over Eastern Europe or Central Europe. And the United States doesn’t accept that it’s de-industrialized.

Ashley: A question about the situation in the US. Another thing that I’ve just read recently, and I know that you’re preparing an article about it, but with interest rates going up in the United States, I’ve also seen a report, I can’t remember which paper it was in, that the commercial property sector looks like it might be the next sector that’s going to be in trouble in the United States. Could you explain how that sector’s come to be?

Commercial property is bought very heavily on mortgage with very low down payment by very large companies. And now that the average occupancy rate of buildings is down to 60%, in some cases 50% in some cities, the rent is not generating enough money to cover the mortgage payments. So large private capital companies that have invested in real estate – they’re called Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) in the United States – are simply walking away from the commercial buildings.

One of the largest companies walked away from $800 million of property last week, and another company the month before walked away from half a billion dollars. So we’re seeing just a huge abandonment of commercial buildings, and they’re essentially being turned into luxury apartments. Commercial buildings are being gentrified. Now that more and more staff is working from home and avoiding transportation, there’s no use for the office space.

There’s no reason for companies to renew the leases, and many of the leases are coming due this year. But also many of the mortgages on commercial property, unlike home mortgages, they’re not 30-year mortgages, they’re shorter-term mortgages and they’re being reset at the higher interest rates now that are again making buildings run in deficit.

So if you’re a commercial property owner and you’ve borrowed money, you put down $1 and borrowed half a billion dollars, you can do that in the United States. And it’s really not your money, it’s borrowed money that bought it. As long as the rents are not sufficient to pay the carrying charges, the mortgage and the local taxes, and water and sewer fees, then you just walk away from the building. So there’s a wholesale abandonment of commercial property here.

That means that bank balance sheets are going down, for two reasons. Number one, if the bank has a mortgage at a low interest rate, now that interest rates are high, the market price of this mortgage has fallen to 70% or more. The whole country is looking like Silicon Valley Bank. The mortgage portfolio and government bonds are all falling in market price, to less than the deposits that the banks owe.

This is not a problem as long as the depositors leave their money in the banks. But depositors are pulling their money out of the banks that are not paying very much for deposits, and are putting them into government bonds that now are paying 5% or so, instead of the 1% that you have in banks. Some banks in America, even in New York City, are getting desperate and are saying, we’re going to pay 5%. But the depositors realize that if they’re suddenly paying such a high rate and they’re not getting income, it must be that they’re in trouble and we better move our money out. If we have more than $250,000, which is federally insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, we better move our money out. It’s not safe. And so there’s a feeling that the banks are not very safe, given the Fed’s decision that they want to raise interest rates to strengthen the dollar.

So the dollar is going up, the euro is going down, other currencies are going down. That’s creating a wave of defaults in Global South debts. If there’s a default on foreign debt, that’s going to hurt the banks and bondholders also. So all of a sudden this debt that has been built up since 2009, for the last 14 years, all of this is suddenly blocking any kind of recovery at all.

Now that the Congress has cut back social spending, you’re having the homelessness problem rise, you’re having the poverty problem rise, you’re forcing dependent mothers who’ve been living on food stamps, you’re taking away their ability to get food stamps, and they’re being forced to beg in the street. They’ve taken away the Medicaid coverage for medical care, so that if people get COVID, they’re not able to protect themselves and will be infecting other people. The wastewater reports in America show a rising degree of COVID, and yet they’re not reporting any statistics anymore at the Centre for Disease Control. So nobody has any way really of following what’s happening, but it just looks as if a disaster is blooming. So of course, they have to fight in Ukraine. Otherwise, people would begin to look at what’s happening in the United States.

Ashley: Are the American people following the Ukraine war?

Yes, every day. They’re told that Ukraine is winning day after day. It’s killing more Russians, the Ukrainians are very brave, and Ukraine is just winning, and NATO’s policy has worked by giving them the super weapons that are defeating Russia, which is really just a gas station with atom bombs. That’s repeated again and again. After they have the Ukrainians beating the Russians on television, they have the American warships in China saying that China can’t do anything at all against the United States and that we’re number one.

So that’s quite prominent. The rhetoric against China is prominent in the US media at the moment as well.

Yes, especially over the computer chips, Nvidia, what’s going to happen to it, the pressure on South Korea not to use any nickel that comes from China, which I think refines 80% of nickel. If it has any nickel component instead of American-made nickel, it’s not going to get the tax favoritism that is given to American firms. There have been a whole set of special tariffs against Russian and Chinese-made raw materials, or anything else that’s Chinese that essentially is trying to force Europe and Taiwan and South Korea to relocate their chip production and electronic production to the United States instead of in their own countries.
What do you think of the satellites and countries like Australia? Is it going to work? The America’s strategy?

It all depends on how other countries react. As long as America has been using its non-governmental organizations, its charities, its overseas subsidies to promote politicians who are favorable to the United States, the politicians will follow US policies. The United States has talent scouts all over Europe and Asia that look for promising graduates in their 20s who are very opportunistic and yet have a seemingly wide political appeal. They nurture them and they give them financial support from the American foundations, and bring them to America for training and gradually groom them to be prime ministers or politicians or military leaders or political administrators who are pro-American.

They’ve been doing this for the last 75 years since World War II ended. You have a managerial class in Europe and apparently much of Asia that has already been protected by the United States that has their wealth tied to support from the United States and property in the United States or in the US economy. So the political leadership of Europe is very different from the popular perceptions of what Europe needs. Europe and much of Asia is being run according to what benefits the United States, not what benefits their own domestic populations. And of course, that’s what gets America so upset about Russia and China: They’re actually trying to run their economies to support their own living standards, their own population and their own military power instead of subordinating their interests to US interests.

Ashley: They’ve all become colonies, really, a lot of these satellites. And it’s been like that really for a long time, I think.

Well, they’ve become colonies, not officially of America but of the international organizations that America controls. Colonies of the International Monetary Fund, colonies of the World Bank, colonies of the International Criminal Court with pro-American judges. They’re colonies of what seem to be international organizations, but actually are US-centered and US-controlled international organizations. It’s not explicitly American. It’s just that America has veto power in every one of these organizations and controls their finances.

Ashley: And then also, I think it’s the case not only for Europe but certainly for Australia, is that our military has become so integrated with the US military and the intelligence has become so integrated with the US intelligence and reliant on America for the armaments and for fixing them and maintaining them, that we can’t operate militarily without the United States. So that’s the military dimension. I imagine it’s like that in Europe as well as Korea and Japan.

What concerns Turkey and Saudi Arabia is their dependence on military weaponry. They’re dependent on repairs of armaments and replacement parts, because things are always wearing out on tanks or airplanes. If the Americans cut you off and you go your own way, even if you have a lot of American arms, you don’t have the replacement parts or repairs. You’ll have to begin cutting up one of your airplanes to get the replacement parts to fix in an airplane that needs it.

So there’s now a reaction against buying US arms, because they realize they can all be cut off and that as long as the arms last, you’re dependent on the United States to maintain them. And so they’re looking for a more secure means of supply. And that takes quite a while to really develop alternative arms.

The Ukraine war is a kind of testing ground for US missiles and arms against Russian arms. You can see that the Patriot missiles that America has provided Ukraine with have been shot down. The anti-missile protection that America has provided Ukraine has not worked. The Russians have been able to blow up the ostensible protection. So it turns out that these arms were really just like luxury goods. They’re like wine that is meant to be traded and sold but not actually to be drunk. Because if you drink this precious 50-year-old wine, you realize it turned into vinegar and doesn’t taste that good anymore.

The arms are not meant to actually be used in combat. They’re to be used in parades and used as trophies to show “Look at all the tanks and the airplanes we have.” But if you try to fight with them, it doesn’t work so well. That’s what is got the Americans so upset that they’ve told the Ukrainians to bomb the dams and just destroy infrastructure with the underwater torpedo bombs. That’s the only way in which America can fight. It has means of destruction, but not fighting human beings and not defending.

So Europe is pretty much undefended right now – without arms of its own. They’ve been used up in Ukraine. And America has said, “Well, Europe, you’ve got to cut back your social spending and do what America’s done. Use your budgets to buy American arms to restock for all the airplanes and the tanks and the missiles and the ammunition that you’ve been sending to Ukraine. That’s going to be 4%, 5% of your GDP. It’s all going to be paid to America.”

“We realize that your euro is paying for this. It’s going to go down in value. But when the euro goes down in value, what’s really going to lose? Your wages are going to go down because labor is now going to have to pay much more money for what it imports from the Global South for its raw materials, from China for its consumer goods.”

So you’re going to have a chronic depression spreading throughout Europe that nobody in Europe is able to see how they can get out of. Certainly the European industry says, “We’re not going to get inexpensive Russian gas anymore. We have a choice. Either we move to America that has low price gas, or we move to Russia and China, or Iran or one of these other countries. Where are they going to move to?” Because Europe is a dead zone now. America has won the Ukrainian war against Western Europe.

KC: These allies of the U.S., they are not learning from the post-World War I lessons of being the actual main enemies of the U.S.

I think they have learned from it and said, “We lost in the aftermath of World War I with the Inter-Ally debts. We’re going to lose again. We’d better move out of Europe and move to America. Europe’s dead. We’ve got to leave. We can’t go through the 1920s and 30s again.” That’s what they’ve learned: to surrender.

KC: With Europe going down, what is now going to happen about de-dollarization?

Europe is not going to de-dollarize. De-dollarization isn’t simply a move out of the dollar. It’s a restructuring of the trade structure. Trade is going to be more and more among the Eurasian countries and between Eurasia and the Global South, Africa and South America. You’re having trade that is going to be financed by currency swaps with each other, just as Saudi Arabia and China hold each other’s currencies for their trade in oil and manufactures. You’re going to have this kind of arrangement with African countries and with countries like Brazil.
The problem to be solved is that some countries are going to run deficits, especially deficits with China for manufacturers and with Russia for raw materials. How are they going to finance these deficits?

The first thing to replace the dollar with is going to be gold. All of Eurasia is building up its gold reserves and running down its dollar reserves. It’s spending its dollars as it has to for things that you do buy with dollars – raw materials and others. But it’s not replacing these dollar reserves. It’s using their income to buy gold.

They’re trying to create an alternative to the International Monetary Fund. They call this the BRICS Bank, but it’s going to be more than a BRICS Bank. It’s going to be able to create its own paper gold, its own version of special drawing rights, its own idea of what John Maynard Keynes called Bancor in 1944. It’ll be a kind of credit that will be extended by surplus countries to deficit countries to enable them to run deficits until such time as China and other countries build up their infrastructure, build up their economies to become self-sufficient and part of this new Eurasian trading and currency zone. It’ll be a trading, currency, military organization.

You’re going to have the whole world reoriented in a way that avoids the US and European economy. The US and Europe economy will become one unit, along with Australia and New Zealand as the English-speaking parts of the world. The rest of the world is going to be going to go its own way. The world will be dividing into these two different parts with different philosophies. The West is going to be a financialized zone, where the central planning is concentrated in Wall Street. Who’s going to get the credit, and for what? How are we going to allocate money and credit?

Eurasia and the rest of the world is going to be increasingly industrial-socialist. The way in which the world was evolving just before World War I and then stopped for the West. Asia is going to pick up this ideal of industrial capitalism evolving into socialism, treating money as a public utility in the hands of the government, not in the hands of a private 1%. You’re having military policy protecting the whole region, a kind of Eurasian counterpart to NATO to protect against the US military bases.

You’re having trade dovetail. Production and consumption is going to dovetail among countries in a way that is going to be balanced as other countries develop their own ability to feed themselves, to provide their basic needs. They’ll treat health care as a public right, as a public utility and human right. They’ll treat housing as a public right and food as a public right. They’re not going to be people starving in the street or on the subways as we see in New York when they don’t have jobs. Everybody will be protected instead of polarizing.

What you expect will be standards rising in Eurasia and the Global South. Production will be rising, productivity will be rising. Labor will become healthier, better fed, better educated in these regions. And the opposite will be occurring in the United States. It will polarize more. The cities here are pretty much going broke, especially as commercial property is being abandoned. The tax base of cities is going down and they’re having to cut back spending on transportation because people are now working from home instead of taking the subway or trains or buses into the cities. You’re having a whole economic restructuring, both in Asia and in the United States, but this restructuring is going in opposite directions.

KC: Michael, you very beautifully presented a projected possibility for Eurasia to develop.
What would be your advice or your warning about the kind of relationships among the different countries with different resources and developing levels? What would you warn against a certain replication of the kind of hegemonic relationships within this Eurasian bloc?

You begin by realizing that these countries are different from each other. Because they’re different, the problem in putting together a BRICS bank or any international organization is who is going to be in control. The Americans have always insisted that they will not join any organization in which they don’t have veto power. Beginning with the United Nations and then the Americas vote in the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, they can veto anything, according to the rules that set up these organizations. In Eurasia they have to realize that countries are very different. That’s going to make it politically difficult to decide when we allocate these credits to cover their trade and balance-of-payments deficits. Who’s going to get how much credit? Is there a limit to it?

How are we going to enable countries to pay? If one country is going to run a sustained surplus, like China, and other countries are deficits, how do we prevent the debtor countries from ending up like they ended up today, owing dollar debts in Latin America and other countries? How do we create a financial system that’s not going to use finance as the new form of economic warfare to gain control of government? How are we going to make it politically run for the benefit of the real economy of production and consumption, instead of for the benefit of the financial investors who are in charge of buying up and privatizing these means of production?

America and Europe are going to be privatizing more and more of the public domain, just as Margaret Thatcher began in England. America and Europe will end up like England after Margaret Thatcher and the Labour Party when Tony Blair went even further. How do you avoid privatization? By guaranteeing certain economic rights to everybody. How do you guarantee health care, housing, and food?

All this requires an economic ideology, a doctrine. You can’t just do it ad hoc. In the beginning, you do it ad hoc. You make it up as you go along, you see what’s the line of least resistance, what is easiest to do. But at some point there has to be a discussion of what is socialism today. Maybe you don’t want to call it socialism. Whatever you call it, it could be Eurasia with Eurasian characteristics. You have to have some basic bill of rights and a constitutional guide, not like the American Constitution that is set in stone, never to be changed, but a constitution that will be continually upgraded, continually modified, moving forward.

How do you create a flexible institutional structure that can evolve going forward, to meet the increasing and the changing requirements of societies that are trying to industrialize, that are trying to cope with environmental problems like global warming and extreme weather? How are you going to cope with new diseases? How are you going to confront the United States and keep it out of your region? How is Eurasia going to have its version of the Monroe Doctrine saying, Eurasia for the Eurasians.

There’s no need for the North Americans to be anywhere near Asia. You can have your own continent and you can destroy it all you want, but stay off our territory, just like we’re staying off your territory.

It’s like the split that you had in religion 1000 years ago. But instead of a split in religion, you’re having a split in economic philosophy, a split in the decision of what’s worth doing and what are the priorities. How are we going to set priorities that are going to prevent the kind of depression and economic degeneration that is happening in the United States?

We do want to learn from the United States, but we don’t want to learn how to become like the United States. We want to learn how to avoid the problems that have occurred in the United States. So you use the United States and Europe as an object lesson for what you want to avoid. The question is, how do you create a group of international organizations that are free from the economic polarization, privatization and financialization that have destroyed the American and European economies.

Continues at .......


All of this is a different way of thinking about how the world evolves, and you need to develop that alternative and to share it so that other countries can realize, ‘yes, there is an alternative to the America’s bank-run economy’. This is the outline of an alternative and our governments are going to create administrative agencies and regulating principles that promote overall welfare, not simply financial welfare. The real economy, not the financial claims on the real economy."

Yellen’s Daydream | Michael Hudson

That's a long tapestry.

Resume' ?

I bet even hoohoo didn't bother reading that shite all the way through.

‘We can de-risk but not decouple’ from China, says Raytheon chief

Head of aerospace and defence group says western manufacturers will find it impossible to completely cut ties.

"Western manufacturers will be able to de-risk their operations in China but will find it impossible to cut ties completely with the country, according to the head of one of the US’s largest aerospace and defence companies.

Greg Hayes, chief executive of Raytheon, said the company had “several thousand suppliers in China and decoupling . . . is impossible”.


“We can de-risk but not decouple,” Hayes told the Financial Times in an interview, adding that he believed this to be the case “for everybody”.

“Think about the $500bn of trade that goes from China to the US every year. More than 95 per cent of rare earth materials or metals come from, or are processed in, China. There is no alternative,” said Hayes.

“If we had to pull out of China, it would take us many many years to re-establish that capability either domestically or in other friendly countries.”

Hayes’ comments underline the difficulties facing western manufacturers amid growing friction between China and the US and its allies."

Continues at:

Subscribe to read | Financial Times

They are kind of beholden to the chinkies until other rare earth deposits are brought online.

Everyone else seems to have been rather lazy.

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Everyone else seems to have been rather lazy

Will newcomers make an impact?

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

rare earth deposits are brought online.

The access to resources is just one factor.

The worlds current suppliers had forsite and even now are less expensive.

Usually the 16% passes "laws", contrary to WTO agreements, which of course allegedly increase their 16% GDP. The end users pay through their nose.

One world class leader, Chinese of course.

Hoohoo's found a youtube video.

How thrilling.

Fuck knows what he's waffling on about though.

"Forsite"?

Amazing in 21 years they have 2 new members.

Originally Posted by malmomike77

Amazing in 21 years they have 2 new members.

In 2001 there were 6 full members, as of 2022 there are 8 full members.

In 2023 ther are 4 in the process of assession to the SCO.

Two of which are allegedly becoming full members on 4th July 2023.

Iran 4 July 2023 and Belarus possibly.

The requirements to join are many and, unlike other global groupings of sovereign countries, the applicants are required to meet the SCO's demanding requirements which includes mutual security, political, and economic cooperation.

Here are the application requirements:

1. General Provisions1.1.

The Organization shall be open for joining by other interested countries in the region asmembers, provided they agree to abide by the purposes and principles of its Charter and by theinternational treaties and instruments adopted within the SCO.

1.2.

A state that wishes to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (hereinafter referred to as the applicant state) should meet the following criteria and conditions, i.e. it should:


 Belong to the Euro-Asian region;

 Have diplomatic relations with all SCO member states;

 Have status of the SCO observer or dialogue partner;

 Maintain active trade, economic and humanitarian relations with the SCO member states;

 Its international commitments in the field of security should not be contrary to the relevant international treaties and other instruments adopted within the SCO;

 Have no armed conflict with another state or states;

 Meet, in good faith, its obligations under the United Nations Charter and comply with the generally recognized norms and principles of international law;

 Should have no sanctions imposed on it by the United Nations Security Council.

Here is an artical from Wikipedia on the organisation:

Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

Shanghai Cooperation Organisation - Wikipedia

No one gives a fuck, it is just a bunch of shithole countries. Maybe you should pick one and move there. BTW this thread is about ruzzia you moron not China.

Is that all the countries the chinkies have stitched up with "Belt and Owed"?

Or the ones they've paid off to not support Taiwan?

Originally Posted by bsnub

it is just a bunch of shithole countries. Maybe you should pick one and move there

Good indication that someone lost the argument, when the "why don't you move there" line appears.


Why don't you go to Ukraine and give them a hand, Chickenhawk ?


ANACS disease ?





(Acute North American Coward Syndrome)

Originally Posted by helge

Good indication that someone lost the argument, when the "why don't you move there" line appears.

What argument would that be?

Originally Posted by helge

Why don't you go to Ukraine and give them a hand, Chickenhawk ?

I give them my money instead. That gets more done.

Originally Posted by helge

(Acute North American Coward Syndrome)

Did you think that up all by your little old self? You really are an epic level fuckwit.

Russian inflation is raging at 60%, not the reported 3.6%, thanks to the ruble's 'freefall', top economist Steve Hanke says

Russia could be grappling with an unreported inflation crisis as its war with Ukraine rages on, if the estimates of top economist Steve Hanke are any guide.

Based on his own calculations, Hanke gauged the Russia's annual rate of consumer-price increases at an eye-watering 60%, far above the 3.6% level most recently reported by the Bank of Russia.

"According to the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, Russian inflation expectations jumped to 11.1% in July. Today I measure inflation at 60%/yr, ~5.5x the central bank's data point. The expectations appear to be way too optimistic," the economist said in a tweet.

"The ruble's FREE-FALL is fueling RAGING INFLATION in Russia," the applied economics professor at Johns Hopkins University said in an earlier tweet.

A weakening currency tends to stoke inflationary pressures because it drives up the costs of imported goods.

Just last week, Russia's central bank raised benchmark interest rates by a whopping 100 basis points to 8.5% in a bid to rein in consumer-price pressures.

"Inflation expectations have risen. Domestic demand trends and the depreciation of the ruble since the beginning of 2023 significantly amplify pro-inflationary risks," the Bank of Russia said.

Soaring inflation is just one of many problems battering Russia's economy. From a dramatic collapse in its current-account surplus, to a plunging Russian ruble and slumping car sales, the country's troubles are numerous.

Moscow's economic challenges have been mounting since the start of its war with Ukraine, amid a wave of Western sanctions that were imposed on the country in retaliation for its invasion.

Russian Inflation Is Raging at 60%, Not the Reported 3.6%: Hanke

Imagine if it weren't the diesel station of Eastern Europe . . .

Hundreds of thousands of people fled Russia after it invaded Ukraine — and now the countries that took them in are seeing a boost in their economies

Hundreds of thousands of Russians who fled their homeland following the country's invasion of Ukraine have resettled in neighboring countries — and are boosting their economies.


The exodus of Russians started after many highly educated professionals — such as academics, finance, and tech workers — left Russia in the early days of the war, Insider's Jason Lalljee reported in March 2022. About six months later, there was another wave of departures after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a partial military mobilization for the Ukraine war on September 21.


By October, about 700,000 Russians had left the country, Reuters reported, citing Russian media — but the Kremlin rejected those numbers, saying it didn't have this data.


Many of these Russians landed in neighboring countries, setting up new lives and businesses, and ended up boosting the economies of these nations, the independent Russian media outlet Novaya Gazeta reported Friday.


The GDP of the South Caucasus — a region comprising Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia — grew by an outsize 7% in 2022, the World Bank found. This far outpaced the 5.6% growth that World Bank economists had predicted.


Armenia — once known as the Silicon Valley of the Soviet Union — saw its 2022 growth spike to 12.6%, the World Bank found. The institution's economists had forecast last year 7% growth for the country.


Suren Parsyan, a lecturer at the Armenian State University of Economics, told Novaya Gazeta that Armenia's growth last year was thanks to the newly arrived Russians, particularly those working in IT.


Russians transferred about $1.75 billion to Armenia in 2022, Martin Galstyan, the country's central-bank governor, said in January, Armenia's News.am reported.


Meanwhile, Georgia's GDP jumped by 10.1% in 2022, the World Bank said, beating an 8.8% growth forecast. Money transfers from Russia rose fivefold, from $411 million in 2021 to $2.1 billion in 2022, according to data from Georgia's central bank.


Even Kyrgyzstan's economy grew by 7% in 2022, outpacing a 4% forecast, the World Bank said.


Turkey, a hot spot for Russians fleeing the war, saw its economy grow 5.6% in 2022, outpacing a forecast of 4.7%, according to World Bank data.


Oleg Itskhoki, an economics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Novaya Gazeta that the GDP performance in such countries demonstrated that the newly arrived Russians had savings and were wealthier than the local residents.


To be sure, immigration hasn't had only a positive influence on the economies. The influx of Russians also contributed to a rise in inflation, such as a jump in hotel rates and rents in Kazakhstan and Georgia, Bloomberg reported in September.

Hundreds of thousands of people fled Russia after it invaded Ukraine — and now the countries that took them in are seeing a boost in their economies

Where is that bozo Sabang now? According to him, the sanctions aren't working.

Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov has demanded that the Russian Central Bank explain why the ruble is crashing.

Solovyov, one of the most well-known figures in Kremlin-backed media, made the remarks on his show that airs on Russia-1—an excerpt of which was shared on X, formerly Twitter, by Francis Scarr from BBC Monitoring.

His heated comments came after the ruble slumped toward 100 per dollar on Wednesday, its weakest level in 16 months. The Bank of Russia later announced that it would halt purchases of foreign currency on the domestic market for the rest of the year.

"The bloody Central Bank, which has alarmed the whole country and isn't even explaining why the hell the ruble exchange rate has jumped so high that they're laughing at us abroad, at our ruble being one of the three weakest currencies," said Solovyov, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"Thanks to the 'genius' policy of the Central Bank which despises the people so much that it won't even say a single word to them about what it's doing!" He added.

The Russian currency has slumped amid sanctions imposed by the European Union, the United States and other Western allies in response to Putin's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Russia was kicked out of the SWIFT global banking system, while Western nations blocked Russia's access to some of its foreign reserves. Europe also froze purchases of Russian oil and gas, and in December 2022, the G7 agreed on a price cap on Russian crude and refined petroleum products, putting further strains on the ruble.

The Wilson Center, a United States-based think tank, said Russia's road to economic recovery has been made significantly more difficult by its anti-Western and isolationist rhetoric.

Newsweek has contacted Russia's foreign ministry via email for comment.

https://www.newsweek.com/russian-sta...lovyov-1818931

I'm not laughing. It's sad that the high-heeled war criminal has led his country off a precipice and caused so much death and carnage.

He needs to pay.