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| English: Vladimir Putin and Gerhard Schroeder (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
By E.I.R. Strategic Alert
www.eir.de
According to some informed accounts, Russian President Vladimir Putin is seriously considering more “dirigist” as opposed to “liberal” approaches to the economy. In that context, as reported in the Russian liberal financial daily Vedomosti of Jan. 18, he commissioned a group of Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) economists last December to prepare a report on ensuring stable economic development under conditions of global instability.
The article, headlined “Glazyev Will Set the Course for the Country”, was illustrated with a photomontage depicting an alarmed Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov with a smiling Academician Sergei Glazyev leaning over his shoulder. The latter is an official adviser to Putin.
Vedomosti claimed to have copies of Putin’s Dec. 8, 2012 order to the Academy, as well as a memo from economist Glazyev to Putin on the matter. The cited excerpts are consistent with policy papers published by the former in recent months. The financial daily highlighted his proposals for a new Law on Strategic Planning and “a fundamental change in credit and monetary policy on the basis of developing domestic sources of monetary supply, creating a development budget for investing the funds accumulated in the Reserve Fund and the National Welfare Fund, and expanding the Russian economic space through Eurasian integration.”
Noteworthy is that Glazyev warns that the massive moneyprinting by the US, UK, EU, and Japan, “to refinance their banks at negative real interest rates as the main line of anticrisis policy,” is not only feeding into new “debt pyramids,” but opening the door to buying up and looting “real assets worldwide” -- thus presenting a threat to Russia. The memo also reportedly invokes the war danger, saying that “the logic of how the global financial-political system reproduces itself involves a further escalation of military and political tension, up to and including the unleashing of a big war.”
Unsurprisingly, these leaks immediately provoked alarm among the liberal free-traders such as Anatoli Chubais and Gorbachov-linked circles.
On Jan. 16, Putin held a session of his economic aides and cabinet ministers to take stock of the downturn of industrial growth rates in the second half of 2012, push his demands for implementation of the social spending promised during his reelection campaign last year, and call for “finding additional resources” to invest in infrastructure. (Putin has already fired two ministers for recalcitrance in delivering on the campaign promises, fuelling rumors of a possible wider shakeup.) He also ordered the speedy establishment of an institution to invest a portion of the oil and gas export earnings, into infrastructure.
Academician Glazyev was a member of the first post-Soviet Russian cabinet, but he resigned in opposition to the economic looting policies and President Yeltsin’s military crushing of the elected Parliament in 1993. He later served in the State Duma and ran for President. In recent years, he coordinated the formation of the Russia-Belarus-Kazakstan Customs Union.
As head of the Duma Committee on Economic Policy, Glazyev held hearings in June 2001 on how to ensure Russia’s development under global crisis conditions, at which Lyndon LaRouche was a featured speaker. The English edition of Glazyev’s book Genocide: Russia and the New World Order was published by EIR in 1999.
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