Is Russia really going to throw Neoliberalism overboard?

Those of us who hail from the heterodox economic traditions keep wondering in some amazement at the persistence of neoliberal thought.  I mean, how much evidence of failure will it take to discredit these people?  We have had major meltdowns and corruption on a scale so vast that it boggles the mind in just the last 25 years and yet the persistence of belief marches on.  It's not that I have not had experience with this sort of behavior before.  My mother once got a letter from a 95-year-old friend who was very sick.  In spite of his age and health, he closed with a paragraph stating that he was still convinced that the Lord Jesus Christ was coming back during his lifetime to take him home to heaven.  He had believed that he would be Raptured since he was a teenager—why stop now?  He died in less than two weeks.

This is what I think of when I read that some neoliberal believes that high interest rates are good for the economy or that privatizing a public good leads to greater prosperity.  Makes a belief in the Rapture look positively enlightened by comparison.  In the case of Russia, we find the toxic waste of neoliberalism crippling an economy already under stress from organized economic sanctions and a dramatic fall in the price for oil—Russia's big deal export.  Russia's economy should logically be on a wartime footing given the external threat.  And yes, there have been some remarkably successful war economies organized in traditionally capitalist havens (see USA 1941-45).  If you look at these successful war economies, they look almost nothing like neoliberalism.  So why has V. Putin chosen to keep the Yeltsin-era neoliberals around to mismanage his economy when almost anything else would make his country stronger and more able to cope with external threats?  Good. Damn. Question.

It turns out Mr. Putin has been asking this very question.  And he looks like he is about to throw some neoliberals overboard.  If he thinks the western press has been hostile, wait until his tries ridding himself of the official economic religion.  Insane Tyrant will be the kindest description by the folks at the Guardian.

Of course, this conversion to a more rational economics may still be wishful thinking.  The writers below who argue that Russia is going to try something else, Engdahl, Hudson, and Roberts, are known critics of the neoliberal madness.  They want someone (with a reasonable chance of success) to try the heterodox methods.  There is a lot of pride on the line here.  I know how that feels.  It has been nearly 30 years now since I first reassembled the most successful ideas of the USA Progressives from 1873-1973—the effort that led to Elegant Technology.  With every bump and crash that demonstrates once again how neoliberalism tends towards Gilded Age Neofeudalism I ask myself—will anyone with the necessary clout ever stand up to this crazy thinking?  It's only the survival of the species that's at stake, after all.

Putin: Nyet to Neo-liberals, Da to National Development

F. William Engdahl, 02.08.2016

After more than two years of worsening economic growth and an economy struggling with 10.5% central bank interest rates that make new credit to spur growth virtually impossible, Russian President Vladimir Putin has finally broken an internal factional standoff. On July 25 he mandated that an economic group called the Stolypin Club prepare their proposals to spur growth revival to be presented to the government by the Fourth Quarter of this year. In doing so, Putin has rejected two influential liberal or neo-liberal economic factions that had brought Russia into a politically and economically dangerous recession with their liberal Western free market ideology. This is a major development, one I had been expecting since I had the possibility to exchange views this June in St. Petersburg at the annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

With very little fanfare, Russian press a few days ago carried a note that could have a most profound positive significance for the future of the Russian domestic economy. The online Russian blog, Katheon, carried the following short notice: “Russian President Vladimir Putin instructed (the Stolypin economist group–w.e.) to finalize the report of the Stolypin Club and on its basis to prepare a new program of economic development, alternative to Kudrin’s economic plan. The program itself should be given to the Bureau of Economic Council in the IV quarter of 2016.”

In their comment, Katheon notes the major significance of the decision to drop the clearly destructive neo-liberal or free market approach of former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin: “The Stolypin club report advises to increase the investment, pumping up the economy with money from the state budget and by the issue of the Bank of Russia. In turn, the concept of the Center for Strategic Research (Alexei Kudrin) suggested that investments should be private and the state is to ensure macroeconomic stability, low inflation, reduced budget deficit.”

Kudrin failed

In the current situation of severe Western economic and financial sanctions against Russia the flows of such private investment into the economy as the Kudrin camp advocates are rare, to put it gently. Cutting what is a very minimal budget deficit only increases unemployment and worsens the situation. President Putin has clearly realized that that neo-liberal “experiment” has failed. More likely, is that he was forced to let economic reality unfold under the domination of the liberals to the point it was clear to all internal factions that another road was urgently needed. Russia, like every country, has opposing vested interests and now clearly the neo-liberal bested interests are sufficiently discredited by the poor performance of the Kudrin group that the President is able to move decisively. In either case, the development around the Stolypin Group is very positive for Russia.

In convening the new meeting of the Economic Council Presidium on May 25, after a hiatus of two years, President Putin, noting that the group deliberately consisted of opposing views, at that time stated, “I propose today that we start with the growth sources for Russia’s economy over the next decade…The current dynamic shows us that the reserves and resources that served as driving forces for our economy at the start of the 2000’s no longer produce the effects they used to. I have said in the past, and want to stress this point again now, economic growth does not get underway again all on its own. If we do not find new growth sources, we will see GDP growth of around zero, and then our possibilities in the social sector, national defense and security, and in other areas, will be considerably lower than what is needed for us to really develop the country and make progress. “

Now just two months later, Putin obviously has decided. He clearly has an eye as well to Russia’s next presidential elections in March 2018. In doing so he has selected the one group of the three on the Economic Council that believes that the state has a positive role to play in development of the national economy.

The Stolypin group in many ways harkens back to the genius behind the German “economic miracle” after 1871, whose ideas created the most impressive economic growth from backwardness in all Europe within just over three decades. The only other countries to come near to that German economic achievement were the United States after 1865, and the Peoples’ Republic of China after 1979, with the Deng Xiaoping “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.” The national economic development model is based on the work of the now-all-but-unknown 19th Century German national economist, Friederich List, the developer of the basic model of national economic development.

Three Camps

During the Shock Therapy years of Boris Yeltsin in the 1990’s, Harvard economists like Jeffrey Sachs, financed by meta-plunderer George Soros, advised Yeltsin. The disastrous policies of Yeltsin’s economic team, then led by Yegor Gaidar, implemented wholesale privatization of state assets at dirt-cheap prices to Western investors like Soros. They made drastic state budget reduction, cuts in living standards, elimination of old age pensions of the population. All was done in the name of “free market reform.” After that trauma, beginning with Putin’s first Presidency in 1999 Russia slowly began a painful recovery not because of the Gaidar-Harvard shock therapy, but rather despite it, a tribute to the determination of the Russian people.

As astonishing as it might seem, those free market ideologues, followers of the late Gaidar, until now have held a virtual monopoly over policies of the Economics and Finance Ministries of Russia.

They have been aided by the leader of a slightly different but equally destructive monetarist camp, Central Bank of Russia Governor Elvira Nabiullina who only seems obsessed with controlling inflation and stabilizing the Ruble.

This past May Putin gave the first sign that he was open to the idea that the ever-reassuring reports of his finance and economic ministers about how “recovery is just around the corner” (as Herbert Hoover allegedly said at onset of America’s Great Depression in 1930) were not right. The Russian President convened the Presidium of the Economic Council, a group which had not met in two years, charging them to come up with a plan to solve Russia’s economic problems. The Presidium consisted of thirty five members representing each of the three major economic camps.

Former neo-liberal Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin headed one camp backed by Finance Minister Anton Siluanov and Economic Minister Alexey Ilyukayev. This group demands the usual Western laissez-faire remedies such as drastic reduction of the role of the state in the economy via wholesale privatization of the railways, energy companies like Gazprom, and other valuable assets. Kudrin was also named by Putin to chair the newly-reorganized twenty-five-member economic strategy group in May. Many national economists feared the worst at his naming, namely a revival of Gaidar shock therapy, Mach II. That now will clearly not happen. Kudrin and his approach have been rejected as not effective.

The second group was represented by central bank head, Elvira Nabiullina. They were the most conservative, claiming that no reforms were needed and that no economic stimulus was needed either. Just hold a steady course under double-digit central bank interest rates and that will somehow kill inflation and stabilize the Ruble, as if that was the key to open the economic growth potential of Russia. It has instead been the key to slowly kill the economy and increase inflation.

Stolypin Group

The third group represented was the one most Western observers ridiculed and dismissed, with the US Pentagon-linked Stratfor referring to them as a “strange collective.” I have personally met and talked with them and they are hardly strange to anyone with a clear moral mind.

This is the group which after two months has emerged with the mandate from Vladimir Putin to lay out their plans to boost growth again in Russia.

The group is in essence followers of what the great almost-forgotten 19th Century German economist, Friedrich List, would call “national economy” strategies. List’s national economy historical-based approach was in direct counter-position to the then-dominant British Adam Smith free trade school.

List’s views were increasingly integrated into the German Reich economic strategy beginning under the Zollverein or German Customs Union in 1834, that unified one German internal domestic market. It created the basis by the 1870’s for the most colossal emergence of Germany as an economic rival exceeding Great Britain in every area by 1914.

This third group, the Stolypin group in the May, 2016 meeting, included Sergei Glazyev, and Boris Titov, co-chair of Business Russia, and Russia’s “business ombudsmen” since the creation of that post in 2012. Both Titov and Glazyev, an adviser to Putin on Ukraine and other matters, are founding members of the Stolypin Club in Russia. In 2012 Glazyev was named by Putin, then Prime Minister, to coordinate the work of federal agencies in developing the Customs Union of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia, today the Eurasian Economic Union. Titov, also the Leader of Right Cause party, is a successful Russian entrepreneur who in recent years has turned to work advancing various economic policies within the state, often in vocal opposition to Kurdin’s free-market liberal ideas. Notably, Titov is also co-chairman of the Russian-Chinese Business Council.

A broad indication of the kind of proposals the Stolypin group will propose to revive substantial economic growth in Russia and deal with major basic infrastructure deficits that greatly hinder productive enterprise came in a series of proposals Glazyev made in September 2015 to the Russian Security Council, a key advisory body to the President.

There, Glazyev proposed a five-year ‘road map’ to Russia’s economic sovereignty and long-term growth. It was aimed toward building up the country’s immunity to external shocks and foreign influence, and ultimately, toward bringing Russia out of the periphery and into the core of the global economic system. Goals included raising industrial output by 30-35 percent over a five year period, creating a socially-oriented ‘knowledge economy’ via the transfer of substantial economic resources to education, health care and the social sphere, the creation of instruments aimed at increasing savings as a percent of GDP, and other initiatives, including a transition to a sovereign monetary policy.

In 1990 the first priority of Washington and the IMF was to pressure Yeltsin and the Duma to “privatize” the State Bank of Russia, under a Constitutional amendment that mandated the new Central Bank of Russia, like the Federal Reserve or European Central Bank, be a purely monetarist entity whose only mandate is to control inflation and stabilize the Ruble. In effect money creation in Russia was removed from state sovereignty and tied to the US dollar.

Glazyev’s 2015 plan also proposed to use Central Bank resources to provide targeted lending for businesses and industries by providing them with low subsidized interest rates, between 1-4 percent, made possible by quantitative easing to the tune of 20 trillion rubles over a five year period. The program also suggested that the state support private business through the creation of “reciprocal obligations” for the purchase of products and services at agreed-upon prices. As well Glazyev proposed that the Ruble build up its strength as an alternative to the de facto bankrupt dollar system by buying gold as currency backing. He proposed that the Central Bank be mandated to buy all gold production of Russian mines at a given price, in order to increase the ruble gold backing. Russia today is the world’s second largest gold producer.

Obviously Russia’s President has realized that whatever impressive advances Russia makes in the foreign policy area can be fatally undercut by a failing economy, Russia’s Achilles Heel as I noted in an earlier piece. The July 25 announcement by Putin has the potential to reverse that if done with resolution on all levels. There the President has a responsibility to clearly lay out their strategy over the coming five years—by the way a very useful time frame to judge results having nothing to do with old Soviet five-year plans, as France’s De Gaulle understood as well. By giving the population a clear vision of their future, he can tap into the remarkable Russian human resources to literally accomplish the impossible in turning the economy into a genuine prosperity based on sounder foundations than that of the monetarist laissez faire West which today is de facto bankrupt. Bravo Russia!  more

Will Russia Reject Neoliberalism?

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS – MICHAEL HUDSON, AUGUST 11, 2016

According to various reports, the Russian government is reconsidering the neoliberal policy that has served Russia so badly since the collapse of the Soviet Union. If Russia had adopted an intelligent economic policy, its economy would be far ahead of where it stands today. It would have avoided most of the capital flight to the West by relying on self-finance.

Washington took advantage of a demoralized Russian government, which looked to Washington for guidance in the post-Soviet era. Thinking that the rivalry between the two countries had ended with the Soviet collapse, Russians trusted American advice to modernize its economy with best-practice Western ideas. Instead, Washington abused this trust, and saddled Russia with an economic policy designed to carve up Russian economic assets and transfer ownership into foreign hands. By tricking Russia into accepting foreign capital and exposing the ruble to currency speculation, Washington made sure that the US could destabilize Russia with capital outflows and assaults on the ruble’s exchange value. Only a government unfamiliar with the neoconservative aim of US world hegemony would have exposed its economic system to such foreign manipulation.

The sanctions that Washington imposed – and forced Europe to impose – on Russia show how neoliberal economics works against Russia. Its call for high interest rates and austerity sank the Russian economy – needlessly. The ruble was knocked down by capital outflows, resulting in the neoliberal central bank squandering Russia’s foreign reserves in an effort to support the ruble but actually supported capital flight.

Even Vladimir Putin finds attractive the romantic notion of a global economy to which every country has equal access. But the problems resulting from neoliberal policy forced him to turn to import substitution in order to make the Russian economy less dependent on imports. It also made Putin realize that if Russia were to have one foot in the Western economic order, it needed to have the other foot in the new economic order being constructed with China, India, and former central Asian Soviet republics.

Neoliberal economics prescribes a dependency policy that relies on foreign loans and foreign investment. This policy creates foreign currency debt and foreign ownership of Russian profits. These are dangerous vulnerabilities for a nation declared by Washington to be “an existential threat to the US.”

The economic establishment that Washington set up for Russia is neoliberal. Most notably, the head of the central bank Elvira Nabiullina, minister of economic development Alexei Ulyukayev, and the current and former finance ministers, Anton Siluanov and Alexei Kudrin, are doctrinaire neoliberals. This crowd wanted to deal with Russia’s budget deficit by selling public assets to foreigners. If actually carried through, that policy would give Washington more control over Russia’s economy.

Opposed to this collection of “junk economists,” stands Sergey Glaziev. Boris Titov and Andrei Klepach are reported to be his allies.

This group understands that neoliberal policies make Russia’s economy susceptible to destabilization by Washington if the US wants to punish the Russian government for not following Washington’s foreign policy. Their aim is to promote a more self-sufficient Russia in order to protect the nation’s sovereignty and the government’s ability to act in Russia’s national interests rather than subjugate these interests to those of Washington. The neoliberal model is not a development model, but is purely extractive. Americans have characterized it as making Russia or other dependencies “hewers of wood and drawers of water” – or in Russia’s case, oil, gas, platinum and diamonds.

Self-sufficiency means not being import dependent or dependent on foreign capital for investment that could be financed by Russia’s central bank. It also means keeping strategic parts of the economy in public, not private, hands. Basic infrastructure services should be provided to the economy at cost, on a subsidized basis or freely, not turned over to foreign owners to extract monopoly rent. Glaziev also wants the ruble’s exchange value to be set by the central bank, not by speculators in the currency market.

Neoliberal economists do not acknowledge that the economic development of a nation with natural resource endowments such as Russia has can be financed by the central bank creating the money required to undertake the projects. They pretend that this would be inflationary. Neoliberals deny the long-recognized fact that, in terms of the quantity of money, it makes no difference whether the money comes from the central bank or from private banks creating money by making loans or from abroad. The difference is that if money comes from private banks or from abroad, interest must be paid to the banks, and profits have to be shared with foreign investors, who end up with some control over the economy.

Apparently, Russia’s neoliberals are insensitive to the threat that Washington and its European vassals pose to the Russian state. On the basis of lies Washington has imposed economic sanctions on Russia. This political demonization is as fictitious as is the neoliberal economic propaganda. On the basis of such lies, Washington is building up military forces and missile bases on Russia’s borders and in Russian waters. Washington seeks to overthrow former Russian or Soviet provinces and install regimes hostile to Russia, as in Ukraine and Georgia. Russia is continually demonized by Washington and NATO. Washington even politicized the Olympic games and prevented the participation of many Russian athletes.

Despite these overt hostile moves against Russia, Russian neoliberals still believe that the economic policies that Washington urges on Russia are in Russia’s interest, not intended to gain control of its economy. Hooking Russia’s fate to Western hegemony under these conditions would doom Russian sovereignty. more