Free Republic

Preliminary data from Russia's Finance Ministry showed that the country's fiscal surplus shrank to 55 billion rubles ($860 million) in the first nine months of the year, down from 137 billion roubles ($2.15 billion), Bloomberg reported. Olga Bychkova, an economist at Moody's Analytics, told Newsweek that the Russian government surplus is 30 times lower, when compared to the same period last year.... She predicted the government budget would post a modest surplus of 0.6 percent in 2022 on high energy prices but flip to a deep deficit of around nine percent in 2023 due to limited growth, imports, and the...

On inflation: 'How long do you guys think temporary is?' Fox News White House Correspondent Peter Doocy cornered Press Secretary Jen Psaki on both her claims that inflation was likely to be temporary and the Biden administration’s repeated insistence that the rising cost of gas could be tied solely to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Doocy pointed to Psaki’s claim, made a short time earlier in Thursday’s White House press briefing, that economists were predicting that inflation would begin to resolve by the end of the year — and he noted that the Biden administration had been claiming that inflation would...