- Russia’s economy has absorbed the shocks from oil and sanctions, and there are signs of a nascent turnaround, although economic activity will still contract by 0.6 percent this year
- The recovery of the Russian economy should be on a stronger footing in 2017, with the economy forecasted to expand by 1.1 percent.
- The authorities are embarking on a necessary and ambitious medium-term fiscal consolidation program to adjust to permanently lower oil prices.
An International Monetary Fund (IMF) mission led by Ernesto Ramirez Rigo visited Moscow during November 14–18, 2016, to discuss the economic outlook and related policies. At the conclusion of the visit, Mr. Ramirez Rigo made the following statement:
“The economy has absorbed the dual shocks from oil and sanctions, and there are signs of a nascent turnaround, although economic activity will still contract by 0.6 percent this year. The recovery should be on a stronger footing in 2017, with the economy forecasted to expand by 1.1 percent due in part to higher oil prices. Inflation has continued to decelerate and is now projected to decline to 5.6 percent at end-2016, and to fall further towards the central bank’s inflation target over the course of next year. The current account surplus is forecasted to narrow as the recovery of imports outpaces the increase in export receipts, in part because non-traditional exports have yet to benefit from the ruble depreciation.
“The authorities are embarking on a necessary and ambitious medium-term fiscal consolidation program to adjust to permanently lower oil prices. The reestablishment of the three-year fiscal framework is welcome and will help anchor expectations. However, to sustain the significant adjustment, fiscal consolidation should rely on better targeted and more permanent structural reforms to the pension system, tax exemptions, and subsidies, while protecting public and human capital investment. Finally, the enactment of a revised fiscal oil price rule would help reduce policy uncertainty and cement the fiscal adjustment.
“The expected fiscal consolidation and the subdued nature of the recovery are putting in place the conditions for the central bank to resume, in due course, monetary policy easing in a manner consistent with the 4 percent inflation target. However, the pace of easing should take into account the presence of external risks and the need to build credibility under the newly introduced inflation targeting regime.
“The authorities are preparing changes to the bank resolution framework, which include the creation of a bank resolution fund and introduction of statutory bail-in. Staff looks forward to analyzing the planned reforms and to further discussing these issues with the authorities, including during the annual Article IV mission expected to take place in May 2017.”
source: http://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2016/11/29/PR16529-Russian-Federation-IMF-Staff-Concludes-Visit
——-
Saker commentary: in other words, Russia has survived both the drop in oil prices and the sanctions and is on the path of recovery. It took Russia 2 years to do that, exactly as Putin predicted it. The AngloZionist plan against Russia has failed.
The IMF worried that a devaluation of the ruble would set off a round of inflation. Its insistence on Russia maintaining an overvalued currency and its supporting that with billions of dollars of loans ultimately crushed the economy. When the ruble was finally devalued in 1998, inflation did not soar as the IMF had feared, and the economy experienced its first significant growth.
Despite a confession to having held wildly mistaken expectations of being able to engineer the financial collapse of Russia, the IMF like a wounded snake obstinately tries to inject its poison, quote: “fiscal consolidation should rely on better targeted and more permanent structural reforms to the pension system, tax exemptions, and subsidies”.
If Russia’s fiscal authorities drink this IMF Kool-Aid, Putin will have a fight on his hands to prevent Russia from relapsing into the Yeltsin years and sinking down along with USA and Western Europe into the bottomless pit of debt to Rotchschildt.
What?! The Zionist politburo has sent a commando of IMF goons into the territory of the Russian Federation to check if the Moskals are behaving as Noah and Moses have envisioned in millennia past?
What nerve these freaks have! I am glad Ernesto Ramirez Rigo and his storm troopers’ ‘visit’ came to an end before they were able to burn down St. Petersburg and to poison Moscow’s water supply. For heaven’s sake!
:-)
I have always had strong doubts what “economic growth” really is most OECD-countries when actually as latest studies of US economy are suggesting majority of GDP is nowadays in EU and Northern America virtual economy. Chinese study of US economy claimed not long time ago that just 28% of US GDP is nowadays real economy ( 5000 billion $) while 72% was “money with paper” virtual economy (13 000 billion $). That same study was suggesting that US real economy stopped growing after fall of 1971. US medium incomes has barely increased since 1973 (while top 20% and especially top 1% have become much more wealthy).
And here’s another study from 2009:
“In the components of the U.S. GDP in 2009, the financial services sector accounted for 21.4% while the real economy sector accounted for 65%. The total output value of the U.S. financial services industry is composed of two major parts: one is the transferred production value, most of which comes from value distribution of participating in international production. Another part is the inflated value originated from credit innovation, which belongs to bubble value. In addition, due to the high economic financialization, more than half of the profits in the real economy come from the returns of financial activities. If we exclude the factor of virtual economy, the U.S. actual GDP is about 5 trillion U.S. dollars in 2009, per capita GDP about $ 15,000. Meanwhile, the total domestic consumption was 10.0 trillion U.S. dollars and government expenditure was 4.5 trillion U.S. dollars. The production capacity of real value in the national economy is the material base to arrange social distribution and consumption. As the U.S. government arranges its budget according to the GDP including the virtual value, its revenue must fall short of its expenditure, so the socialization and normalization of debts will exacerbate the environment of economic development. It is predicted that the average real GDP per year of the United States will not reach 6 trillion U.S. dollar and per capita GDP will be less than 20,000 in the coming 3-5 years.”
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2012-14-05/has-china-already-passed-us-world%E2%80%99s-largest-economy
As far as the IMF is concerned, ‘strong growth’ means as much as possible of the economic profits flows to western oligarchs.
I concur with you. The US economy is actually a bubble. It is blown up by what in the final analysis, are usurious practices that reached to all sectors of its economy and sucks economic blood from the global economy via its fiat currency – the US dollar. The US today is the major global source of both political and economic instability. It’s belligerence is also setting a very bad example for nations like Japan – a nation that is historically prone (addicted as the late Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore once implied) to militarism.
Here’s the source of the US real economy (5 trillion $) versus virtual economy (13 trillion $)
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/14/panic-in-america-people-in-revolt/
“A Chinese observer, Qiao Liang, author of Unrestricted Warfare (1999), abused in English translation with the inaccurate subtitle, “China’s Master Plan to Destroy America,” recently identified the germ of the country’s general economic disease in the neoliberal shift from productive to financial investment:
“This financial economy (using money to make money) is much easier than the real (industry-based) economy. Why will it bother with manufacturing industries that have only low value-adding capabilities? Since August 15, 1971, the U.S. has gradually stopped its real economy and moved into a virtual economy. It has become an ‘empty’ economy state. Today’s U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has reached US$18 trillion, but only $5 trillion is from the real economy.””
Putin runs yet another epic troll against the US claims Russia hacked and inteferred with the recent presidential election.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akLBItPCcv8
The US accidentally bombs a hospital in Mosul, kills 90-100 Iraqi troops and leaves ISIS to pick up the pieces and salvage some nice new hardware.
https://z5h64q92x9.net/proxy_u/ru-en.en/colonelcassad.livejournal.com/3119670.html
Perhaps it is not so surprising given WikiLeaks has revealed US State Dept emails confirming that Al Qaeda and US were on the same side in Syria.
https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/23225
Tying up a few conceptual “loose ends”:
Pizza-gate, the IMF, Russia, the Family, Sex and Civilization.
Back in the early 80’s I learned from a certain organization (give credit where credit is due) that John Maynard Keynes was a sexual deviant whose ideas had a great deal to do with the many subsequent decades of perverted performance globally of the International Monetary Fund.
The quote that stuck in my mind was that Keynes described the function of the IMF as being “the higher sodomy”. He was not being critical of it. This was his effusive praise of that institution. Billions of human beings have been subsequently economically sodomized, over the last eight decades, world-wide, much to Keynes and his ilk’s sick, satanic delight.
I did a search before posting this, using the Key Words of Keynes —-IMF —- Sodomy and at the top was the organization that researched these matters in the 1970’s and gave me the right clue, the gestalt to what the IMF has been, spiritually and in its “economic” practice. I won’t post that link, because it contains an “L” word that immediately shuts down many weaker brains and sends them into paroxysms of fear and paranoia. Some can overcome this debilitated state. Many may never do so, so in agapic deference to them I scrolled down further and found this gem an article by ex-Navy Seal Jim O’Neill:
http://canadafreepress.com/article/harvard-homosexuals-and-far-left-fabians
This fine article gets to the root of the matter, and has a nice Canadian angle as well as a Russian angle:
At the bottom of his article is a short bio of this Deplorable which includes this phrase:
“Awarded US Army, US Navy, South African, and Russian jump wings.”
This article has everything I was looking for, by a fellow “Deplorable” except precisely how to bury the IMF and psychopathetic and deviant NWO. Recognizing and being against evil is the easy part.
Knowing what the “Good” is and implementing that Good is the Great Work of building consciousness and building a civilization of consciousness where disgusting things like Hitlery, Podestas, “Pizzagate” and the IMF ain’t never gonna happen again.
That’s my purpose, although I understand how many people are not yet able to see that in me, but a few do have an inkling in that regard. I also recognize the same impulse in some others here, despite our widely varying pasts. But this is not about me or you or what others like or dislike about either or any of us. It’s about billions of other still living human beings and conceivably trillions more to come far, far, far into the future, and whether we have any positive impact on that future or are just flapping our lips and taking up space for a few very very short decades, advancing nothing.
O’Neill ends his article on the sexual and psychological deviancy flank, referencing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”:
“The only pragmatic reason to repeal DADT is to weaken, demoralize, and confuse the US military. The new House Republicans say they are going to change things? They might start by having the quisling members of the Pentagon who supported the repeal of DADT exchange places with LTC Lakin and the “Leavenworth 10.” Now that would be change I can believe in. (Link)
No more “Mr. Nice Guy”—the “Welcome” mat is officially withdrawn. Now and forever.
Laus Deo.
Why do so many people blame Keynes for everything that went into the wrong direction? Is he vilified nowadays because he wasn’t a Neoliberal?
John Maynard Keynes predicted a tough economic future for post WWI-Europe in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace.
In the book (Revisiting Keynes: Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren) several “experts” point out that his grasp of economic relations was correct in many instances. A summary of the aforementioned book says:… Keynes imagined that by 2030 the standard of living would be dramatically higher; people, liberated from want (and without the desire to consume for the sake of consumption), would work no more than fifteen hours a week, …. Does this sound like someone praising wickedness? (Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren)
The Chicago Boys are part of an entirely different story. They learned their trade under Milton Friedman – the economist who praised greed. Those “famous” economists were able to transform Chile in Latin America’s best performing economies at the expense of high unemployment.
If someone had thought it couldn’t get any worse, he was way off. The Harvard Boys did an even better job. They organized a fire sale of Russia’s assets, caused high unemployment and prevented Russian companies from being competitive. That’s quite some accomplishment.
What did happen to the embedded links?
Neither Keynes nor “Anonymous” need any help from me, but I’d like to second what “Anonymous” has said. Keynes was a great economic theorist and economic diplomat. Bretton Woods was a realistic and successful second-best solution to the architecture of global finance and trade that allowed individual countries a degree of genuine sovereignty in deciding their own economic policy.
Whether or not the economists co-opted to “reform” Russia genuinely believed their economic doctrine, I can’t tell. It is only recently that a significant minority of the profession have produced a coherent critique of the “Washington Consensus” (scientific fads and political expediency seem to have subverted rational debate). I find it astonishing that the “Harvard boys” are still held in high regard after the tragedy they helped create. I suppose it’s their reward for services to the Empire.
I imagine Russian economists like Mr. Glazyev who pointed out the bleeding obvious at the time and were disregarded must have come close to despair – but now that there is a chance to escape the neoliberal orthodoxy it is imperative that they are rigorous in their analysis and realistic in the policy they propose (as Chinese economists have so far just about managed – I can’t help feeling they’ll fall off the tightrope one of these times).
in other words, Russia has survived both the drop in oil prices and the sanctions and is on the path of recovery. It took Russia 2 years to do that, exactly as Putin predicted it. The AngloZionist plan against Russia has failed.
From the beginning, in early 2014, I regarded the West’s policies as amounting to a new invasion of Russia. Just the same as Hitler did in 1941, just like Napoleon in 1812, and exactly like Charles XII in 1708. All of these examples were about the West using military force to in attempt to vassalize Russia.
This time around, the West’s weapons were economic warfare, NATO expansion, and a proxy war in Ukraine. Sanctions were expected to paralyze Russia’s economy and possibly ignite a revolution. NATO expansion into Ukraine was meant to trigger a domino style pattern of most other ex-Soviet republics being swept into the Atlantic Alliance. The West Ukrainian military’s foray into Donbass was supposed to demonstrate that NATO could bite.
In the end, a disempowered Russia would be hopelessly dependent on the West, and would be ripe for partition. A 21st century conquest of Russia would then be accomplished by having used hybrid war tactics.
And, from the start, I said that Russia would triumph this time around, just as it did in 1812, 1941-45, and in 1708-09. Fighting on the defensive for its national existence, Russia would repel the invaders.
Now, the question is, will Russia follow up on its victory by destroying the invaders in their lairs? That’s what Russia did in 1814, when it conquered Napoleon. Russia did the same at Berlin in 1945, and to the Swedes after 1709.
Maybe Russia will conclude this hybrid war by spurring Euroskeptics to loosen up the EU and roll back back NATO. Possibly those organizations could be dismantled. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this happen at all. History moves in circles.
“Now, the question is, will Russia follow up on its victory by destroying the invaders in their lairs? That’s what Russia did in 1814, when it conquered Napoleon. Russia did the same at Berlin in 1945, and to the Swedes after 1709.”
Arguably, this time, as in 1945, the ‘lairs’ are in Washington and Tel Aviv.
“In other words, Russia has survived both the drop in oil prices and the sanctions and is on the path of recovery.”
And a large part of the reason for that is the correct call by the central bank to let the currency fall and try to contain the inflationary consequences. Well done the central bank. No?
During the Asian Financial Crisis circa 1997, the IMF fanned out across the region to offer its poisoned advice to all those dumb enough to accept.
Malaysia’s then PM Dr. Mahathir Mohammed defiantly and loudly told the IMF to not set foot on Malaasian soil.
Their “assistance” was not desired or wanted in Malaysia.
Malaysia subsequently emerged from the crisis relatively unschathed when compared to those that swallowed the IMF poison and got caught in a web of austerity and aggressive privatization.
The IMF subsequently admitted that if Malaysia had followed the advice that was prescribed by the institution, the country would not have fared as well.
The IMF is primarily preoccupied with stripping countries of their assets and sovreignty.
They advocate for the removal of local regulations that protect the national interest and they push for new legislation that make the countries assets attractive and available for sale to shady international corporations.
The IMF is currently in the process of ripping Greece and the Ukraine to shreds, with the connivance of local elites.
If Russia continues to resist the evil influence of this organization it should do just fine.
“The IMF is currently in the process of ripping Greece and the Ukraine to shreds, with the connivance of local elites.”
Precisely. And it shows convincingly how profoundly the Left/Right divide has mutated. In both cases — Greece and Ukraine — what we see is a firm commitment to First World parasitism on the part of the local elites, corroborated by a chauvinist, gullible population. The Bandera worshipping Ukros welcomed their Western liberators (again) with open arms and open legs, staging post-Maidan demonstrations for instant wage hikes to Western European levels. In Greece, Social Democratic Leftist “radical” Tsipras successfully sold the preposterous lie about “EU without austerity” to a most receptive audience.
Still, there are substantial differences between Greece and Ukraine. Most notably, the latter is dead and decomposing at the hands of her beloved Western superiors. No problem whatsoever since, according to Ukro Weltanschau, whenever you find yourself in dire straits always resort to political coprophagia in the form of hard-core Nazi-style Russophobia. The Ukros possess no common sense whatsoever; the West treats suchlike admirers with richly deserved contempt.
Greece, by contrast, has a recent history of prosperity under the auspices of EU and NATO. With the EU approaching its terminal prolapse and with Social Democracy totally discredited, Greek society splits between a pro-imperialist, cosmopolitan zio-faggot Left versus an anti-Western, anti-immigrant, nationalist Right along the lines of most of Western Europe.
The IMF has very little to fear in the case of Ukraine. The failing and ailing EU, on the other hand, will be a problem since the IMF is correctly perceived there as the force for austerity and immiseration that it really is. Suchlike accurate perceptions are clearly beyond the intellectual capabilities prevalent in the Ukraine.
Interestingly enough, Trump’s advisor Paige Carter on a visit to Moscow has stated that the news re Crimea and the Ukraine contains much too much misinformation ,calling if s fragrant example of fake news…..and having been involved in banking and investment in Russia, is saying he is sure there will be opportunities to overcome these misconceptions and the direction the Ukraine has been taking.
Anna-news node 69474.