Russian vassalization of Ukraine

[gla22]

Russia is still slated to grow at .2% this year. Admittedly that is slow. However Russia isn't running deficits, if the U.S. wasn't boosting GDP with government defecit spending our GDP would be slowing by .5-3%. We'd be in recession. Russia has a very strong economy.

[Spider]

[Kane]

[eynon81]

[John Galt]

more soviet nostalgia: first may day parade in red square since the fall of the ussr

http://news.yahoo.com/russia-stages-fir ... NlYwNzcg--

second highest ranking nato official is describing russia as an adversary as russia no longer seemingly cares to work with nato http://news.yahoo.com/nato-official-rus ... NlYwNzcg--

[eynon81]

(shrug)

I find it kinda comforting that history's back. At least we know what were getting into.

[gla22]

Russia's current slowdown is a direct result of the sanctions but as you can see it isn't particularly damaging. The fundamentals are still strong. Russia is a technologically advanced country, is diversified, has critical natural resources, little debt and whose government runs small deficits or surpluses. There has been a moderate drop in stock prices and a mild drop in GDP growth due to sanctions, neither of them are particularly that damaging. If the economy was tanking Putin's approval rate wouldn't be at 80%. Obama's is 41% by comparison.

The U.S. was supposed to grow 1.2% the first quarter of 2014 but only grew .1% on account of the "bad winter."

You can think what you want but sanctions at this point have been ineffective by the standard that you would hope that they'd influence Putin's desc ion making process or make it harder for him to govern.

[Dylan]

Um. Sanctions have knocked Russia from 1.3 projected growth to .2. They're expected to lose 100B in investments this year alone.

Not sure why you are pretending they are invulnerable.

[gla22]

[The Comrade]

"might be significant enough"

so you're saying if russia's main trade partners stop trading with them, there's a slim possibility it could affect them negatively?