Russia is the biggest economy in Europe in terms of PPP, and has a bigger industry than all of NATO combined. Yet, here we have you regurgitating nonsense that you've been spoon fed by your propagandists.
This still doesn't make Russia magically have a larger industrial base than NATO, it's absurd.
And the fact that you don't even understand why using nominal GDP is nonsensical really does add to the comedy.
You think Price Point Parity is a measure of size, so I'm not sure you even understand what you are trying to claim. You're certainly not using the right terms
And if you think Russia allocating 40% of government spending to be able to wage war on one small country makes them capable, good luck đ€
This still doesnât make Russia magically have a larger industrial base than NATO, itâs absurd.
I guess at this point I shouldn't be surprised that your reading comprehension is poor.
You think Price Point Parity is a measure of size, so Iâm not sure you even understand what you are trying to claim. Youâre certainly not using the right terms
I certainly am using the right terms. Cost of production in Russia is far lower than in the west, which makes it absurd to make GDP comparisons. The fact that you can't understand this shows that you have no clue regarding the subject you're attempting to debate here. Here's an example that might help you understand what's happening
And if you think Russia allocating 40% of government spending to be able to wage war on one small country makes them capable, good luck đ€
Except Russia isn't doing anything of the sort. This is just something you pulled out of your ass because you're an extremely gullible individual who lacks capacity for critical thinking.
Often the analysis weâre presented with in the media is often limited to GDP, which doesnât really help us to understand why the US, for example, have lost its competitiveness, its industrial strength, its ability to compete, especially with the Chinese.
The idea of American economic growth from the 1990s on was, instead of producing manufactured goods, we will develop intellectual property monopolies, especially in information technology, in pharmaceuticals. And America will make its economic growth in GDP, not by making profits to employ labor to produce more and more goods and services, but to have monopoly rents for our pharmaceuticals. So we can make pills that cost 10 cents each and sell them for $500 each. We can make computer programs for automatic artificial intelligence and for computer chips and for all of the information technology we have at enormous markups. And we can live on our economic rents, live off the fat of the land, as they used to say. We donât have to have blue-collar jobs. Everybody can work in an office and make money that way.
You have today, as the election for 2024 is being prepared, the bewilderment of the Democratic Party here. If you look at the GDP, President Biden says, youâre doing so well, look at GDP. And the vast majority of Americans, according to every poll in every part of the country says, weâre not doing well at all. Weâre doing awful. And it turns out that when you look at what is the American GDP, well, almost all of it is the growth in prosperity, the growth in financial benefits for the 1%, maybe for the 10% of the population. And the 1% and the 10% has increased its wealth so much since 2008 led the Federal Reserve to slash interest rates that the 1% and the 10% gain is larger than the loss for the 90%. So all that the President Biden can say is, who are you going to believe? Are you going to look at the statistics or are you going to look at your own life and what you have to spend at the grocery store and what you have to spend on rent and housing as America turns away from a homeownerâs economy into a rental economy?
The main culprit for the economyâs falling growth rate and the general middle-class economic squeeze is debt â or more specifically, the burden of having to pay it back, with penalties, fees and lower credit ratings. The mainstream press depicts the rising market price of homes as a benefit to homeowners, a capital gain as if they almost were real estate speculators or capitalists in miniature, not wage-earners running up debt. GDP statisticians include the rise in valuation of owner-occupied real estate and the rising rents it saves homeowners from having to pay as adding to GDP. But homeowners do not receive a corresponding income for living in their homes, even if rents rise in their neighborhood. And debt-financed home-price inflation has become a major factor squeezing family budgets in todayâs world.
When they fall behind in their payments and are subject to late fees and higher interest rates, these payments are treated as an addition to GDP (âfinancial servicesâ), as if the economy is getting richer. So when the specific components of what seems to be empirical statistical evidence of affluence are analyzed, they consist not of real product and prosperity but transfer payments from the economy at large to the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector.
Payments on the economyâs rising debt should rightly be viewed as a subtrahend from national income. But the GDP accounting format treats this rising debt as a necessary cost of production. In this line of theorizing, creditors provide a productive service whose value is reflected in the rate of interest and the magnitude of fees and penalties. Ultra-low interest rates, resulting from financial lobbying pressures, have held down the cost of carrying this debt, but these low official rates mask the reality that many debtors fall behind and have to pay penalty fees and high penalty interest rates.
These payments are added to todayâs GDP measure, even as they leave less family income available to be spent on products. The result is a statistical confusion concerning how much GDP growth is actual income and product growth, and how much is rent extracted from disposable personal and corporate income. That is the basic conceptual issue addressed in this paper.
The key to understanding the U.S. economy is not so much GDP as capital (asset-price) gains and the offsetting debt burden financing these gains. This financialized overhead is not real growth. It does not make the economy richer. This paper explains why, and provides a statistical format to measure the magnitude of rent extraction or the FIRE sector on the âproductâ side of the economy, deflating disposable personal income available to spend on goods and services, and capital gains on the âtotal returnsâ side, so as to show how most wealth is achieved not by actual production but by increasingly debt-financed asset-price inflation.
I wonât try to when Hudson is such a good explainer. His 2019 paper he refers to is here: PDF. I think itâs largely an updated executive summary of his 2015 book, Killing the Host (PDF).
If you prefer video/audio, here are three relevant episodes from this year of Hudsonâs & Radhika Desaiâs Geopolitical Economy Hour:
You mean because Bojo sabotaged the talks in Istanbul that could've prevented a war resulting in hundreds of thousands of people dying and Ukraine being destroyed in the process?
You can thank the US deindustrialization in the 60s and 70s they did to crush working class movements for that. They're currently cannibalizing Europe to make up for that.
