Via Bloomberg:
From his perch as Vladimir Putin’s adviser for building ties with fellow former Soviet republics, Sergei Glazyev perceives the world shifting to a war footing.
There’s a war waged against Russia with economic sanctions and military conflicts roiling Ukraine to Iraq, according to Glazyev, 53, an academician and a native of Ukraine who for the past two years has advised Putin on integration with Belarus and Kazakhstan....
Glazyev, a Soviet-educated economist, has been sanctioned by both the EU and the U.S. for allegedly meddling in Ukraine’s sovereign affairs. A former State Duma deputy and co-founder of the nationalist Rodina party, he ran against Putin for president in 2004...
“The point of a series of regional wars organized by the Americans, especially today’s catastrophe in Ukraine, centers on the U.S. securing control over all of north Eurasia” to bolster “its position against China,” Glazyev said. “That’s how the U.S. military and oligarchs are trying to maintain leadership in the global competition with China.”
The effort will backfire, said Glazyev, who spoke before a round of retaliatory steps announced by Russia yesterday banning food and agricultural products for one year from the U.S., the EU, Norway, Canada and Australia. The U.S.-led “economic war” against Russia will ricochet, leaving the EU to pay the steepest costs in the conflict, he said.
The trading bloc stands to lose about 1 trillion euros ($1.3 trillion), an estimate he says includes the possible bankruptcy of several European banks and companies toppled after the cutoff in financial and economic ties. An energy crisis in Europe will bring a sharp spike in prices and a loss of competitiveness for European producers. Meanwhile, Turkish, Chinese and east Asian nations will fill the void left by the departure of their European rivals from the Russian market...
The fallout will cost 250 billion euros for Germany alone while pushing the three Baltic states to the brink of an “economic catastrophe,” he said. Lithuania and Latvia will lose the equivalent of half of their entire economic output, and the cost for Estonia will reach 50 percent more than its gross domestic product, Glazyev said.
Where does that leave Russia?
“Task no. 1 is to block those threats to economic security that are now coming from the U.S., neutralize them by reducing the dependence of our external economic activity on the mercy of American politicians, whose aggressiveness threatens the entire world,” he said...
To further insulate its economy, Russia should abandon the use of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency, according to Glazyev. Russia, which international reserves are the world’s fifth-biggest, needs to diversify its holdings to include China’s yuan, India’s rupee and Brazil’s real.
“If a country aspires to reserve status for its currency, it should behave properly, and that isn’t the case today,” Glazyev said.
Read the full article here.
Who is Mr. Putin? by Mikhail Khazin (MUST SEE!)
ReplyDeleteThere is a lot of nonsense and garbage floating around on the Internet about the personality of Vladimir Putin, mostly written folks who not only know nothing about him, but who don't even understand the basics about how the Russian state works. Today, I want to share with you a video (especially translated or this purpose by the Russian Team) in which the renowned Russian economic Mikhail Khazin shares his view of Putin and of Putin's current position vis-à-vis the hostile and russophobic West. I don't always agree with Khazin, and even in this case I don't fully agree with some of what he says, but I think that Khazin has really "nailed the bottom line on the head" (how is that for a combo-neologism?). Seriously, I think that Khazin is fundamentally correct, especially about the West's refusal to accept Putin has anything else than a very junior partner (and even that was in the past, now they want him dead). Where I disagree with Khazin is when he implies that Putin wanted or even believed that such an honest partnership was possible. Medvedev - yes. But not Putin. By training and by trade he knew the West, and especially its ruling elites, extremely well and I believe that Putin pretended to play the "partnership game" for as long as possible to buy as much time as possible for his party which I refer to as the "Eurasian sovereignists" (folks like Shoigu or Rogozin), as opposed to the "Atlantic Integrationists" (folks Medvedev or Kudrin). Anyway, listen to Khazin - who is superbly informed and who knows his stuff - and get a rare insider view of what is really happening behind the Kremlin walls.
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2014/08/who-is-mr-putin-by-mikhail-khazin-must.html
A bunch of bluster and propaganda. He wants to reduce Russia's dependence on the dollar, yet the new $400 billion energy deal with China will be denominated in dollars. He says economic war with Russia will cost Europe $1 trillion. Maybe, but they will just have another bailout and short-term spike in energy costs. Russia's economy will be destroyed. Where will they get a bailout?
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