The past and future president of Russia, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, recently said:
"They are living beyond their means and shifting a part of the weight of their problems to the world economy," Putin told the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi while touring its lakeside summer camp some five hours drive north of Moscow.
"They are living like parasites off the global economy and their monopoly of the dollar," Putin said at the open-air meeting with admiring young Russians.
It is hard to disagree that America is abusing her reserve currency status. One reason that we are not experiencing inflation is that we are exporting it to other countries, especially China. China, Japan, and yes even Russia have large investments in American Treasury Bills. Finance ministers around the world are not sleeping well.
Last year at Davos, a economic meeting of various big wigs and elites, Putin said this:
In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state's role absolute. In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly. I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated.
Nor should we turn a blind eye to the fact that the spirit of free enterprise, including the principle of personal responsibility of businesspeople, investors and shareholders for their decisions, is being eroded in the last few months. There is no reason to believe that we can achieve better results by shifting responsibility onto the state.
And one more point: anti-crisis measures should not escalate into financial populism and a refusal to implement responsible macroeconomic policies. The unjustified swelling of the budgetary deficit and the accumulation of public debts are just as destructive as adventurous stock-jobbing.
We live in a world I thought we would never see. A world where the past and future president of Russia under-stands economics better than the present and future president of America. I think we have to agree that not only is Putin more econo-mically correct, but he also looks better without a shirt.