[Skybird]

Well, Russia has enough money to buy gold like crazy, and when comparing their debts to their GDP, they score hilariously better than the US, Britain or Germany. Russias debts equal around 12-15% of its GDP, For the US that value would be somewhere between 110 and 125%, for Germany around 82-85%, and Britain also somewhere between 80 and 90%.

And that is just the explicit debt burden. The implicit, hidden debts you can multiply with factors in the range of most likely 3-5, and then add the result to the explicit debts - for the Wetsern states, not Russia. Russia has less wellfare and all that costly gimmicks, so I would expect their implcit debts to be smaller than that of Wetsern states. But I never read about their implicit debt burden in detail, I must admit, only calculations for Western states.

Russias economic problems are structural, not so much financial. Many say that Russia is financially god knows how weak. while I see the balance shifting against their favour within the coming decades, I nevertheless disagree with these people's assessment. They could always start to do like we do - creating "money" from nothing, and would have much more free manouvering space to waste that way before they end up like we did. At the cost of disconnecting from global markets and isolating their economy, I admit, but that would nothing new for them. Also, the biog globalization hype seems to be over anyway, and a national contraction seems to creep in anyway, especially in the 2nd and 3rd world economies.

Not easy to see the future is, says Yoda.