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[–] 44 points 2 years ago (4 children)

They've migrated to a wartime economy, which gives you a lot of command over the economy. They're currently doing a careful dance of increasing their money supply, while trying to stabilize inflation using what foreign currency reserves and income they have.

The biggest thing keeping their economy going is the price of oil, which is hovering around 80-90$ a barrel. The vast majority of this is being gobbled up by the government via their national wealth fund.

So long as heightened domestic productivity is maintained for the war, and the price of oil is higher than 60-65$ they could retain solvency for years.

A real economic collapse won't be felt until the price of oil bottoms out, or if they attempt to transition out of a war time economy.

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  • [–] 30 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    The key point about wartime economies is that they don't actually increase quality of life for the people, even if everyone is making a decent salary (by Russia standards anyway).

    Public infrastructure in Russia was already struggling before the war, I can only imagine the state it'll be in in 10 years

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago

    The key point about wartime economies is that they don't actually increase quality of life for the people

    That's debatable dependent on the situation and the timeframe you're looking at. You'll usually see an increase in domestic production and consumption as a general by-product of lower unemployment.

    However, they are still going to run into the guns vs butter problem. Unless they actually seize Ukraine and extract more wealth from it than they spent acquiring it, their investments into military infrastructure are going to be losses.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I looked at one of those ship monitoring sites and there was almost a continous string of oil tankers going to and from St. Petersburg, so I'd say they're probably selling a fuck ton of oil still.

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