This is hands-down the best explanation I've heard on why sanctions on Russia backfired, and why they were never going to succeed in the first place.

X ^ | 3/10/24 | James K. Galbraith

[hardspunned]

See, proof positive the sanctions worked! I’m glad you found something to hang the Western hat on.

[Reverend Wright]

“Russia has burned through almost half of the liquid reserves in its national wealth fund as it bleeds money amid the war in Ukraine:

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Russia acquired real assets when they grabbed Western businesses at fire sale prices.

The West seizing Russian Central Bank gold is changing the label on gold buried under the Fed Reserve Bank of NY.

[hardspunned]

Umm, the Russian national debt is under $300 billion. Our debt is $34 Trillion and ours is adding $300 billion every 25 days. How much we got in our “liquid reserves” lock box?

[hardspunned]

Have you looked at some of the Zeeper replies on this thread? Incredibly, they’re serious! You never know around here.

[House Atreides]

“ But the Russians suffer from not having the kind of efficient administrative state and regulatory structure to ensure that the competence of the educated elite guides economic growth and development.”
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I’m assuming you forgot your sarc tag. The Russians are basically letting the markets dictate how resources are allocated and businesses restarted, shut down or reorganized under the current sanctions regime. The funny thing is that the Russians used to have Communist Oarty political officers in just about every business to “guide” actions. Now those “dead weight” Party cadres are gone with the wind that blew the Soviet Union away with the result that Russian businesses are now free to act in the most efficient manner that they desire. American businesses and government agencies are now on the contrary loaded with DEI officials (who are dead weigh serving only to cause incompetent dead weight to be needlessly hired) overseeing the organizations and making them economically less efficient in the same fashion that the old (and long gone) Communist cadres did in the old Soviet Union.

[wildcard_redneck]

My apologies. This site is overrun with leftist lurkers it is hard to filter out the sarcasm from the nasty crypto leftists.

[House Atreides]

“How much we got in our “liquid reserves” lock box?”
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I think Al Gore and Hillary Clinton have the keys to our national lock box. There must be tens of trillions of dollars in it by now.

[kiryandil]

Huileng Tan of Business Clownsider is like the Joe Blogs of BI.

[kiryandil]

https://freerepublic.com/tag/huilengtan/index

[AndyJackson]

Yeah I am quite aware of the Zeeper line of argument. It starts with misplaced moral superiority - you invaded, therefore you are wrong sort of like the school principal expelling a small kid who punched the school bully - then claims the deserved victory as self evident based upon Russian incompetence and Western superiority. - what’s $34 T in debt among friends.

[BobL]

I’m convinced that Joe Blogs is computer generated.

[BobL]

“Did you forget your sarcasm tag? If you really believe that the. you’re part of the problem we face in America.”

The posting you refer to has to be AI generated - we seem have a few of those types here now.

[ransomnote]

on X

This is hands-down the best explanation I've heard on why sanctions on Russia backfired, and why they were never going to succeed in the first place.

By economist James K. Galbraith, professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Best quote of his explanation: "This is a situation in which the sanctions were imposed by one important sector of the world economy which then cut itself off from resources that it needs - and that's particularly true of Western Europe - in return for cutting Russia off from various things that Russia doesn't really need."

Second best quote: "If you go back to the period before the introduction of the sanctions [...] the Russian economy was very heavily colonized by Western firms. That was true in automobiles, it was true in aircrafts, it was true in everything from fast food restaurants to big box stores. Western firms were present all throughout the Russian economy. A great many of them [...] either chose to exit Russia or were pressured to exit Russia after early 2022. So on what terms did they leave? Well, they were required, if they were leaving permanently, to sell their capital equipment, their factories and so forth, to let's say a Russian business which would get a loan from Russian banks or maybe have other sources of financing, at a very favorable price for the Russians. So effectively a lot of capital wealth, which was partly owned by the West, has been transferred to Russian ownership. And you now have an economy which is moving forward and has the advantage compared to Europe of relatively low resource costs because Russia is a great producer of resources, oil and gas and fertilizer and food stuff and so forth. And so while the Europeans are paying maybe twice in Germany what they were paying for energy, the Russians are not, they're paying perhaps less than they were paying before the war. So again I characterize the effect of the sanctions, in fact as being in certain respects a gift to the Russian economy. And this is, I think, quite different from what the authors of the sanctions expected. [...] And the essence of the situation is this would not have happened without the sanctions. You could have had the war, and it would have gone pretty much as it has gone. But the Russian government in 2022 was in no position to force the exit of Western firms. It didn't want to, wouldn't have done that. It was in no position to force its oligarchs to choose between Russia and the West. It didn't wish to do that. These choices were imposed by the West, and the results were actually, in many respects, favorable to the long-term independent development of the Russian Federation's economy."

Mar 10, 2024

 

[Drew68]

These days, there are too many economic participants outside US/Europe. Western leaders overplayed their hand.

And we don't make anything anymore.

Russian foundries are churning out plate steel 24/7. Russian factories are churning out munitions 24/7.

We've offshored nearly all of our steel production to China.

And munitions? We can't expand the ammo factories we currently have. Build more? Any new munitions plant would take a decade just to pass the environmental impact study. And then there'd be OSHA and DEI compliance to adhere to.

We're so screwed.

[T.B. Yoits]

Jao Bai-din's handlers knew full well that Russian companies would continue to sell to countries such as the U.K. through middle-men.

Same sale price to Russia, middle-man adds a fee, and the end user, who got in bed with globalists and agreed to the "sanctions", pays a higher price.

[Olog-hai]

They were never intended to succeed, but to weaken the USA. Biden is still as much of an ally of Putin as he has ever been.

[Saintgermain]

Great article, how true !

[Saintgermain]

In a roundabout way the sanctions were about the best thing what could have happen to Russia, as they woke up a sleeping Giant.

[hardspunned]

The sanctions certainly set the Russian economy free from Western constraints.