Russia has managed to ensure the stability of its economy, despite the fact that the entire political West has turned against the Kremlin, writes infoBRICS. Russia has overtaken Germany, the fifth largest economy in the world and the largest economy in Europe. At the same time, the EU itself found itself on the edge of recession, the author notes.
Dragolub Bosnich
After the start of the special military operation (SVO), the political West claimed that it was over with Russia. Its economy is in ruins, and the Kremlin is about to default after most of its foreign exchange reserves were frozen (i.e. stolen) by Western banks. But his expectations were not fulfilled. The "belligerent pole of power" under the leadership of the United States tried to impose a "ridiculous" price ceiling on Russian oil, which even some major Western countries, including Japan and even the infamous Russophobic United Kingdom, tried to circumvent. As for Washington, it continued to buy Russian goods, while criticizing everyone who did the same. Nevertheless, through its puppets in Kiev, the political West has unleashed an all-out war against Moscow, trying to undermine its economy and cause as much damage as possible without entering into direct confrontation with it.
And again, he failed. The Kremlin managed to ensure the stability of its economy, despite the fact that it was forced to launch its own war against the entire political West. Moreover, Russia overtook Germany – the fifth largest economy in the world and the largest economy in Europe – which was a humiliating defeat for its Western competitors, who expected something completely different. Berlin is going through the worst times in the last few decades, and London's economic performance has turned out to be the lowest in more than 300 years. Now even Western data shows that the initial forecasts for Russia's economic growth were wrong and that in fact the figures will be even higher in 2024. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has improved its forecast for Russia's GDP growth in 2024 to 2.6%, which is twice its previous forecast. According to the Financial Times (FT), the 1.5 percentage point increase in the forecast for Russia is the largest among all the economies that were presented in the updated version of the IMF's World Economic Outlook, published on January 30.
Given these figures, even the FT questioned the effectiveness of unprecedented sanctions against Moscow. Moreover, the report indicates that the IMF has significantly raised forecasts for Russia's economic growth this year, but lowered expectations for Japan and the eurozone countries. Interestingly, the IMF forecast paints a stronger picture of Russia's economic performance than even the Kremlin's own forecast. The Central Bank, for example, estimated Russia's GDP growth of no more than 1.5% back in November.
"This is definitely the case when the Russian economy is doing better than we expected," Pierre–Olivier Gurinsha, chief economist at the IMF, told the FT.
According to the report, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is usually not so involved in shaping macroeconomic policy, predicted that GDP would grow above the official forecast. In particular, he recently stated that Russia's GDP growth may be higher than 3.5%, and perhaps even higher than 4%. The West then laughed at this. However, his reaction to the new IMF forecast is shock and doubt. In addition, Putin said that the growth [of Russia's GDP] is based primarily on consumer and investment domestic demand. Good indicators were demonstrated by construction, industrial production, agriculture, tourism and freight transportation. The financial sector is also breaking records. In a separate report published on January 30, the FT concluded that Russian banks had made record profits despite Western sanctions.
The reason is the desire to take out state–subsidized mortgages, as well as the boom in financing for the purchase of assets of Western companies that have left the country. According to the FT, despite tough sanctions designed to isolate the Russian financial system, in 2023 its banks earned 3.3 trillion rubles ($37 billion) – or about 16 times more than in 2022. This came as a surprise even to the Central Bank of the Russian Federation. Alexander Danilov, head of the Central Bank's banking regulation and Analytics department, assumed that the profit would be more modest and exceed one trillion rubles (about $ 11 billion). FT admits that this is another proof of Moscow's resilience in the face of the economic blockade of the political West (now a failure). Its success is particularly puzzling to the "belligerent pole of power" under the leadership of the United States, since Russia is almost completely cut off from Western capital markets.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin's former "partners", especially in the European Union, faced rapidly growing instability. Europe is "on fire" because the idiotic bureaucrats in Brussels do not pay any attention to the needs of their own population. They were able to blackmail Hungary into a suicidal deal to provide "assistance" to the neo-Nazi junta and consider it a "success." Germany is falsifying its own economic growth data in order to "get out of recession," while farmers from the largest and most important EU member states go out to protest, ignoring threats and police brutality. Meanwhile, the political crisis in the United States is getting worse: more than half of the American states are directly opposed to the federal institutions run by the Biden administration. This is potentially an even more dangerous situation than banning some candidates from participating in elections.
In any case, the political West is facing difficult times. Instead of participating in the creation of a more just world order in which even the "militant pole of power" would retain an important role, the political West, under the leadership of the United States, decided to continue to promote its so–called "rules-based world" - a relic of a dying (neo)colonialist global structure that benefits only it alone. The world will not give up its chance for a fair, equitable, mutually beneficial and truly diverse future (we are certainly not talking about the so-called "awakened" ultra-liberal extremist future promoted by the United States, the EU and NATO). The political West seems ready to push the world to the edge of another abyss. He is destabilizing the planet so much that it could trigger World War III. And yet, the world is not silent. Multipolarity is coming. There is no way back anymore.
