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[Great Order]

Hasn't Russia recently been at 17% inflation or something like that?

[Lord Shonus]

I mean, the planet's survived a shooting war with Russia in it for a few years now so frankly I'm not sure what you mean, unless you believe that China could take on the entire world with conventional forces? China is not more likely than Russia to start a nuclear war - for all their many faults the Chinese government at least projects a sense of pragmatism and probably understands that turning cities into dust and ash does not help their prospects.

China's far less likely to start a nuclear war than Russia is, because of the nature of their nuclear arsenal. They very deliberately restricted themselves to a "second-strike" countervalue force that doesn't have anything close to the number of high-precision weapons needed to pose a threat to US or Russian strategic forces. The sole purpose of their nukes is to maul somebody that decides to nuke them, or is about to kick in the doors of Beijing. Even without their long-proclaimed "no first use" doctrine, they are very unlikely to fire the first nuclear shots in a war.

The possibility that they might wind up fighting a conventional war, however, is far from zero. Even if they don't intend to do so deliberately, they have a habit of harassing and posturing the other nations in the area with warships. There is a very real chance that one of those harassment incidents winds up with shots being fired, and many of those countries are US allies.

[Madman198237]

I mean, the planet's survived a shooting war with Russia in it for a few years now so frankly I'm not sure what you mean, unless you believe that China could take on the entire world with conventional forces? China is not more likely than Russia to start a nuclear war - for all their many faults the Chinese government at least projects a sense of pragmatism and probably understands that turning cities into dust and ash does not help their prospects.

China's far less likely to start a nuclear war than Russia is, because of the nature of their nuclear arsenal. They very deliberately restricted themselves to a "second-strike" countervalue force that doesn't have anything close to the number of high-precision weapons needed to pose a threat to US or Russian strategic forces. The sole purpose of their nukes is to maul somebody that decides to nuke them, or is about to kick in the doors of Beijing. Even without their long-proclaimed "no first use" doctrine, they are very unlikely to fire the first nuclear shots in a war.

The possibility that they might wind up fighting a conventional war, however, is far from zero. Even if they don't intend to do so deliberately, they have a habit of harassing and posturing the other nations in the area with warships. There is a very real chance that one of those harassment incidents winds up with shots being fired, and many of those countries are US allies.

Exactly.

If they don't get more careful they might get a lot closer to WWIII than anyone (especially themselves) wants them to, but end the world they will not.

[anewaname]

Yesterday's Joe Blogs video talks about Russian government bond sales with the narrative that the government treasury is having problems. About 6 minutes into the video, there is the chart of Russian government bonds offers and sales, saying that between April and Jun of this year, they were offering bonds at 18 or 19% yield and only sold 2/3 of what they wanted to sell. That is a good bond yield, so is no one buying because they are unwilling or because they have no more money to risk?

edit: And as the narrative of the video plays out, he says the Russian economy and GDP looks strong because the Russian government is buying extra goods from Russian businesses, but their high bond yield is no longer enough to attract buyers.

[Great Order]

So the economy is still going because the government's been stimulating the economy and backfilling with bonds?

And now people are either unable to afford the bonds or the bonds are seen as too untrustworthy?

[Telgin]

If they keep raising interest rates, there's also the incentive to wait to buy bonds when the interest rate goes up instead of buying them now I'd assume.

[anewaname]

That is my interpretation. But "people" would only mean the wealthy ones and the podcaster never says whether the wealthy are unwilling or unable to invest; he just points out that in 2024 Q2, the government only sold 1/3 of the about 17%-yield-bonds they were attempting to sell.

He compares three charts, which include 2022 (when the invasion flopped, and when sanctions were started, and when the $300 billion was frozen), when the central bank rose the rate to 20% and sold a lot of bonds to raise money fast then soon dropped the rates back to about 8%; and over the months kept raising rates and selling bonds and now they are not selling all they want to sell even with the high rate. He points out that the rate now is almost the same as it was in 2022.

[Starver]

This is in the context of those in power having experience (and/or) nostalgia for the Planned(/Command) Economy system. Maybe not so many experienced the full force of the non-Trotskyist version (he prefered the distributed, not authoritariatively centralised, implementation), but enough of it.

Perhaps they associate the teething troubles of those moves towards free-market ideas (sort of about face... it basically 'decentralised' straight out into the oligarchs' pockets - loads of mini-centres - for what could be perceived to be the worst of all routes away from being "entirely in the pocket of the regime") to the, admitedly flawed, open-style economies. The big trouble probably being the anti-socialist tendency to suck control into the hands of the powerful. (Not absent from the situation of the Western 'financier' system, and Big Bank economics, but done differently badly, with different failure modes.)

But when you have (and need) your hands on the actual levers of the economy, as much as has been consolidated back by pressures upon the oligarchs themselves (sometimes just a playful jostle out of a window), it must be tempting to try to minimax your character sheet towards 'winning the game' that you started playing.