“Why would you think Russia does not also have a central bank? They can create all the required pieces of paper with ink on them that the Fed does.”
Then why can’t they magic up enough money to even buy their own most advanced tank platform for their own army? They sold them all to India instead and keep using obsolete retrofitted tanks for their own forces.
The fact is, making money out of thin air has consequences, and despite our $30 trillion in debt, the United States is still in a far better position to weather the consequences of money printing and deficit spending than Russia is, which is why they cannot afford to equip their troops with the quality of equipment they need to match what the West is supplying to Ukraine, even if they have the technical ability to produce such equipment.
“And more important, their GDP is not defined by government spending — or by bytes of movie entertainment. Rather, it is defined by the joules of energy in oil and gas.”
And still Russia’s GDP is pathetic compared to the US, so fat lot of good all those resources seem to be doing for them.
Well, we all grew up thinking that money had some fundamental meaning. Not value. Meaning. Then Bernanke erased that, because he had to. Capitalism failed in 2009, he had to do what he did or people would explicitly die.
Russia has all the money they need to build whatever they want. Anything you hear to the contrary is likely propaganda.
Sit back a moment and think of the Great Depression. 1930 to 1941. It was global. A total smash of systemic integrity.
But it was during those years that Germany found the “money” to build an enormous array of armed forces with which Europe was conquered.
Money is whimsical. It can be created via absolutely no underpinning. Germany in the 1930s had no underpinning. They had been smashed in the post WW I treaties, and It Didn’t Matter. They just created money in a non-monitored central bank and paid workers to build weapons. No underpinning required. Global Great Depression ignored.
Money simply doesn’t decide much. Oil does.