This article originally appeared at The Unz Review
Nearly every other day brings another scary headline about Russia’s economic apocalypse. Inflation is robbing Russians of buying power and Putin propagandistsare denying it. The “wheels are coming off” the regime according to our friends at the RFERL, the end of the regime is nigh according to Bill Browder, and Putin’s days are numbered, at least in the creative imagination of Ukrainian nationalist academic Alexander Motyl.
Masha Gessen’s friends can no longer get their little Gruyères, the “legendary” (primarily for losing his clients’ money) Moscow investor Slava Rabinovich is predicting food shortages, and things are only about to get worse with oil falling to $25 per barrel and the ruble to 125/$1, at least according to the Khodorkovsky-funded Interpret Mag’s Paul Goble, who has made something of a professional career forecasting Russia’s takeover by Muslims and the Chinese.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the guy who has predicted all twelve of China’s past zero recessions amongst other forecasting accomplishments, says that Russia is “in a full-blown depression.”
One would think from all the noise that we are looking at some sort of Greece-like depression, or an imminent rerun of the collapse of the post-Soviet economy in the 1990s.
Now for the rather banal reality. Real GDP is expected to contract by around 2.7% this year according to the World Bank, but then recover to 0.7% in 2016 and 2.5% in 2017.
The reasons behind this are likewise pretty banal. They don’t have a great deal to do with Western sanctions, which hurt the ability of Russian companies to raise capital but otherwise have had little bite, and they have even less to do with any particular feature of Russia’s political system/kleptocracy/lack of economic freedoms that both anti-Russian establishment pundits like Ariel Cohen and pro-Western liberals in Russia like former Finance Minister Alexey Kudrin like to claim as dooming it to economic stagnation. If they were right, then East-Central Europe – most of which is rated as a lot economically freer and less corrupt than Russia on the various indices that proclaim to measure such – would not also have been stuck in a relative economic rut since around 2007.
No, the reason for Russia’s recession is quite simple and boils down to the sharp collapse in oil prices from ~$100 in 2014 to ~$50 this year.
Though the Russian economy is about far more than just oil – natural resource rents are 18% of GDP – it is true that oil is the key component of Russia’s export basket. So when oil prices collapse, in the absence of massive and unsustainable interventions, the ruble devalues.
This is indeed what happened. Imports went down, goods became more expensive, and inflation rose. The Central Bank jacked up interest rates in order to prevent runaway inflation, but at the price of a decline in aggregate demand and consequently a short-run decrease in the GDP. If one is really searching for a comparison, the correct one would be not to Greece (which is locked in a monetary straitjacket by the ECB) nor to the late Soviet Union (wholly irrelevant) but to the Volcker recession in the early 1980s US.
There is now a very substantial output gap. Dependence on Western credit is now much reduced relative to 2013, to say nothing of 2007. Meanwhile, there are active and serious efforts to developRussia’s own financial system, which remains woefully underdeveloped for an economy of its size and scope.
Finally, even if oil prices drop permanently to $50 – which is entirely possible, given the removal of the Iran sanctions, this would not mean the Russian economy would be necessarily doomed to years of stagnation. To the contrary, econometric modeling by Russian economist Sergey Zhuravlev indicates that it would result in a ~1.5 year recession (which began in mid-2013, versus 2012 in his model; but otherwise it remains very relevant) followed by accelerated GDP growth thanks to exports.
Otherwise, macroeconomic indicators remain unremarkable. Corporate debt repayments scheduled for the second half of the year are twice lower than in the first half. The budget deficit is forecast to be 3-4% of GDP for the year and overall state debt levels continue to be very low. (Incidentally, this figure is 20% for Saudi Arabia. Which should put the nail in the coffin of the idiotic conspiracy theory that the fall in oil prices has been orchestrated by them and the US to undermine Russia).
Unemployment has barely budged, not even reaching 6% at its peak. In comparison, it was at 10% throughout much of the 1990s. This is almost entirely an output recession.
Now inevitably when recessions occur, living standards tend to fall, and people have to live more frugally. Reading the Western media, one would think that the recession has led to a tsunami in worker protests, criminality, and elite intrigues against Putin.
But in statistical terms, the real impacts of the downturn have been modest. According to Levada opinion polls, the percentage of people having difficulty buying food and clothing increased to 32% this year from 21% in 2014, but this is still lower than the figure for (pre-crisis) 2012, when it was at 33%, to say nothing of the early 2000s (higher than 50%) or the 1990s (around 80%).
The percentage of Russians who spend either “almost all” or “two thirds” of their incomes on food, another measure of poverty, is 26% this year, completely unchanged from 2014, and actually lower than in 2013 (33%) or the 2000s in general (40%-50%), to again say nothing of the 1990s (consistently around 80%).
These numbers have been confirmed credible by observers such as Russia Insider’s Gilbert Doctorow and Alexander Mercouris, who have personally assessed the situation on the ground, in stark contrast to the New York Times’ Masha Gessen’s reliance on her “Je suis fromage” liberal Russian friend.
It is deeply unfashionable to say this but Russian living standards have improved astronomically in the 15 years of Putin’s rule – more so than the headline GDP figures. As such, even a recession like the current one only kicks living standards back by one or two years.
As such, it is not surprising – if deeply disappointing to the Western elites who want to stir up a color revolution in Russia – that Russia’s level of “protest potential” (the percentage of Russians saying they would be willing to participate in protests, or rating the likelihood of protests as being high) is currently near record lows.
Naturally, any such attempts to put the effects of an ultimately modest ~3% drop in GDP into statistical perspective will be met with accusations of callous indifferent to the plight of the Russian people, and the work of Olgino trolls to boot. I have seen this replayed numerous times on the Internet, even when the people making such arguments were Russians living in Russians, whose only sin was to recount their own (generally modest) experiences and impressions of the recession.
Make no mistake – there is a well coordinated media effort in the West to leverage any Russian economic problems to destabilize the Kremlin. Note the chorus of condemnation around the destruction of food illegally imported from the EU in contravention of Russian sanctions, even though the destruction of excess food is routine under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy.
Naturally, this is driven by their altruistic and heartfelt commitment to the wellbeing of the Russian people. Though isn’t it just a wee bit strange that those journalists and “activists” who tend to shout loudest about the burning of European food also tended to be the ones who maintained the thickest silence about the burning of Russian people in Odessa in the new European Ukraine.
via Marshall Horn, CFTC Russia and the Depression That Wasn't
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