Antiphase

The budget is cracking, power in a panic, the population demonstrates calm

Plenary discussion of the Gaidar forum, Moscow, January 13, 2016

The authorities finally begin to reach the authorities that the miracle that the Russian government has trusted all last year may not have happened. Last year’s bravura optimism and the quarterly relations that the bottom of the crisis has been replaced, were replaced by confusion close to panic. This was very clearly demonstrated by the past Gaidar Forum, where almost the entire economic block of the government, headed by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, performed. The clouds were the Minister of Finance Anton Siluanov, which is not surprising, which is not surprising: it was his department is responsible for the budget execution, which contains revenues based on $ 50 per barrel, while the barrel is now less than $ 30. Siluanov admitted that the government last year revised its own forecasts four times - hoped that it would be better. Now it is necessary to urgently reduce expenses by at least 10%, otherwise it may turn out, as in 1998, the head of the Ministry of Finance warns. The Minister of Economics, responsible for economic growth, Alexei Ulyukaev proposed to postpone the sequestration to the second quarter, expressing the hope that in April, oil would finally begin to grow. And if it does not start? The trouble is that in this situation in power, a temptation may arise to solve financial problems using a printing press. This was very convincingly warned by the first deputy chairman of the Central Bank, Ksenia Yudaeva, conducting a direct analogy with the beginning of the twentieth century and removing the no longer the debt crisis of 1998, but the political one of 1917. However, insiders say: the authorities may try to solve their financial problems - including the need to spend millions of dollars daily on a war in Syria at the expense of the population, and then hyperinflation will cover the country.

It is curious that the authorities and the population were included in the antiphase: if the first is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, then the population refers to the weakening ruble and expensive currency quite indifferently, as evidenced by the results of the Sberbank survey. A year ago, in December 2014, everything was exactly the opposite: the authorities, including Putin President, convinced that the worst or was about to be done, and people swept electronics and household appliances from the shelves of stores. Now, the population, as the surveys testify, has chosen the old Soviet tactics of survival - looking for products at a discount and saves a penny for a rainy day, which, no one doubts, is still ahead.

Why does the price of oil fall ( oil: in search of the bottom ), when shale brown Texas ( American slides ) is bent, which can be a positive scenario for the Russian economy (barrel for a penny) and what the forecasts (what happened) indicate) - about all this in the main topic of the first number of The New Times of 2016.

Photo: Alexander Miridonov/Kommersant