Andrei Martyanov

It would also give a huge boost to the illegal drug trade. Opium production in Afghanistan in 2008 came to 7,700 tons, more than 40 times that of 2001, when international forces arrived.

One could reasonably accurately count cars, refrigerators and tons of beef or chicken produced by the national economy. This count would give an accurate impression of the nation’s economy and would constitute its real Gross Domestic Product (GDP). But not in the new American “economic” paradigm, which turned everything upside down because the financialized American economy was still supposed to remain largest in the world while simultaneously producing less and less.

When Brazil, with a population of 210 million, that is, two thirds the size of the U.S. population, has five times fewer people living in the streets in 2017 than the United States, one has to question the U.S. claim to be a first world country.

In the end, America’s post-World War II economic supremacy had primarily been due to the United States remaining fully unscathed by that war and becoming the world’s main manufacturing hub and owner of the world’s reserve currency.

geoeconomics—a euphemism for America’s non-stop sanctions and attempts to sabotage the economies of any nation capable of competing with the United States—increasingly becomes not only a tool of choice, but the only tool the United States is using globally to try to arrest its obvious decline.

As was noted in the Operative Report by Russia’s Accounting Chamber in August 2020, Russia budget revenues in the first half of 2020 from hydrocarbons’ sales accounted for less than one third (29.3%) of total budget revenues and had dropped by 13% compared to the same period of the year 2019

But for the West in general and the United States in particular where the views of largely uneducated celebrities, a semi-literate school girl from Sweden or of people with journalism background, a euphemism for a degree in language, constitute a viable pool of opinions, any truly scientific counter-argument is of no reason for contemplation for them.

The connection between energy and Germany’s economic decline may not be immediately evident for many but it is a direct connection, because Germany’s goods are extremely energy dependent and energy, or rather its price, is the main contributor to costs, thus making Germany’s goods, from cars to consumer products, less competitive to, as an example, Chinese goods which have both lower labor and, most importantly, lower energy costs.

In other words, the size of American economy is nowhere near its declared “value,” and against the background of a Covid-19-induced economic implosion is shrinking even more.

This means, in other words, that the actual size of the American economy is grossly inflated, which is done for a number of reasons primarily related to the status of the U.S. Dollar as reserve currency and the main engine for its proliferation, the Federal Reserve printing press in the U.S. which has long lived beyond its means and is facing a dramatic devaluation of its status, as dedollarization of world economy becomes a mainstream endeavor, in which Russia leads the way.