Em frangalhos as sanções, e não a Rússia: economia cresce de novo.
US President Barack Obama famously proclaimed in his State of the Union Address in January that Western sanctions had left Russia isolated and its economy "in tatters." But a slew of good news on the Russian economy prompted a European executive in Moscow to retort that it is the sanctions that are in tatters. More and more investors and analysts seem to agree, like Newsweek andBloomberg..
The ruble has made a spectacular 25% rise against the dollars from the end of January low. The Russian MOEX and RTS indexes have risen by 16% and 11% respectively in Q1 2015. According to data from Bloomberg, some 78 percent of Russian companies on the MICEX index showed greater revenue growth in the most recent quarter than their global peers did making them more profitable than other leading emerging markets corporations. Most recent economic data points to a broader recovery across all indicators. Industrial production for the first quarter took analysts by surprise showing only a modest decline of 0.4% year-on-year. This could be compared with a 5.1% drop in industrial production (Jan-Feb) for the one of the sanctions imposing countries, Finland. We would expect that things will get only better with time. Q1 had to absorb the immediate shock. Russia will be better prepared for the future periods and import substitution and other industrial development programs will have a bigger impact later on in the year. And so does the large infrastructure and industrial investments and trade deals with China and Russia’s other Asian partners. The strong industrial production figures correlate with a fairly robust labor market with unemployment at only 5.8%.
Western politicians and pundits should be more careful with their predictions for the Russian economy: Reports of its demise may prove to be premature. Bashing the Russian economy has lately become a popular pastime. In his state of the nation address last month, U.S. President Barack Obama said it was "in tatters." And yesterday, Anders Aslund of the Peterson Institute for International Economics published anarticle predicting a 10 percent drop in gross domestic product this year -- more or less in line with the apocalyptic predictions that prevailed when the oil price reached its nadir late last year and the ruble was in free fall.
Aslund's forecast focuses on Russia's shrinking currency reserves, some of which have been earmarked for supporting government spending in difficult times. At $364.6 billion, they are down 26 percent from a year ago and $21.6 billion from the beginning of this year. Aslund expects $166 billion to be spent on infrastructure investments and bailing out companies, and another $100 billion to exit via capital flight and other currency outflows. As a result, given foreign debts of almost $600 billion, "Russia's reserve situation is approaching a critical limit," he says. What this argument ignores is that Russia's foreign debts are declining along with its reserves -- that's what happens when the money is used to pay down state companies' obligations. Last year, for example, the combined foreign liabilities of the Russian government and companies dropped by $129.4 billion, compared with a $124.3 billion decline in foreign reserves. Beyond that, a large portion of Russian companies' remaining foreign debt is really part of a tax-evasion scheme: By lending themselves money from abroad, the companies transfer profits to lower-tax jurisdictions. Such loans can easily be extended if sanctions prevent the Russian side from paying.
