Skip to main content

Russian Truth

 A few weeks ago I was watching a German reporter visiting part of his wife's family in the Russian far North, places where in the winter the thermometer is often below -50c.  He was asking pointed questions about how the Ukraine war was affecting them directly, and their answer was that they were mostly unaffected.  Moreover, some products (such as lubrication oil) that had disappeared during the early days of the war were back on the shelves.

this seemingly unimportant piece of social news just went in the back of my head, and I assumed that things in Russia were hard but not that hard.  But thinking further it would seem to be some type of error.  First, the lubricant was from Shell, a company that has stopped supplying Russia for nine months now, moreover, lubricants are not high-tech stuff.  So in terms of soft propaganda, it would seem to show that things are normal-ish in Russia which is consistent with the Russian government's statement that GDP was down 2% in 2022.

Because of my current job, I have access to some IMF raw data, not in great depth, but I have some access, and the funny thing is that the IMF reported that Russia's GDP was down 2% in 2022, and Putin was expecting a GDP upswing in 2023 -- this projection was confirmed by the IMF (and the world bank). One small problem, the data doesn't confirm this...Since March 2022, Russia no longer shares its GDP data with IMF/WB just the headline number.  Therefore, the truth about Russian GDP is what Putin says!  

In 2022 more than 1,000 companies "voluntarily" left Russia, and I m not joking here there was no law forcing them to leave Russia, they just decided that they didn't want to be involved in the country anymore. 

We know that Russian automobile production is down, some say that since May of 2022, automobile plants have been repurposed because too many necessary components are unavailable -- sourced from the west.

The truth is the first thing to disappear during a conflict.  It suits Putin to say that Russia's economy has been unaffected by the departure of 1,000 western companies, that's his right, but it also shows how desperate the government of Putin is to show that everything is normal.  In reality, it is far from normal.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ok so I lied...a little (revised)

When we began looking at farming in 2013/14 as something we both wanted to do as a "second career" we invested time and money to understand what sector of farming was profitable.  A few things emerged, First, high-quality, source-proven, organic farm products consistently have much higher profit margins.  Secondly, transformation accounted for nearly 80% of total profits, and production and distribution accounted for 20% of profits: Farmers and retailers have low profit margins and the middle bits make all the money. A profitable farm operation needs to be involved in the transformation of its produce.  The low-hanging fruits: cheese and butter.  Milk, generates a profit margin of 5% to 8%, depending on milk quality.  Transformed into cheese and butter, and the profit margin rises to 40% (Taking into account all costs).  Second:  20% of a steer carcass is ground beef quality.  The price is low, because (a) a high percentage of the carcass, and (b) ground beef requires process
Post a Comment
Read more

21st century milk parlour

When we first looked at building our farm in 2018, we made a few money-saving decisions, the most important is that we purchased our milk herd from a retiring farmer and we also purchased his milking parlour equipment.  It was the right decision at the time.  The equipment dates from around 2004/05 and was perfectly serviceable, our installers replaced some tubing but otherwise, the milking parlour was in good shape.  It is a mature technology. Now, we are building a brand new milk parlour because our milking cows are moving from the old farm to the new farm.  So we are looking at brand new equipment this time because, after 20 years of daily service, the old cattle parlour's systems need to be replaced.  Fear not it will not be destroyed instead good chunks will end up on Facebook's marketplace and be sold to other farmers for spare parts or expansion of their current systems. All our cattle are chipped, nothing unusual there, we have sensors throughout the farm, and our milki
Post a Comment
Read more

So we sold surplus electricity one time last summer...(Update)

I guess that we will be buying an additional tank for our methane after all.   Over the past few months, we've had several electricity utilities/distributors which operate in our region come to the farm to "inspect our power plant facilities, to ensure they conform to their requirements".  This is entirely my fault.  Last summer we were accumulating too much methane for our tankage capacity, and so instead of selling the excess gas, that would have cost us some money, we (and I mean me) decided to produce excess electricity and sell it to the grid.  Because of all the rules and regulations, we had to specify our overall capacity and timing for the sale of electricity (our capacity is almost 200 Kw) which is a lot but more importantly, it's available 24/7, because it's gas powered.  It should be noted that the two generators are large because we burn methane and smaller generators are difficult to adapt to burn unconventional gas, plus they are advanced and can &qu
Post a Comment
Read more