The Russian news site Deita.ru on June 20 published an article reporting on a recent interview with famed Russian economist Sergey Glazyev. Glazyev has long been one of the most forward-thinking economists in Russia, and as such is deemed one of the most dangerous from the standpoint of Western imperialists seeking to prevent Russia from developing a truly independent economic policy. He is also one of the clearest in his placing today’s global and strategic crisis as resulting from the financial collapse of the trans-Atlantic financial system, something which he said President Vladimir Putin has “repeatedly warned” about. The following is based on the machine-translation of the article, which itself is a summary of Glazyev’s interview with the radio Moscow FM:
Glazyev said that Russian President Putin has known at least since 2014 that Russia needed to create its own independent systems, free from the trappings of the global liberal system. A separate Eurasian economic zone was needed, which Russia could lead and which in the future would become a new pole of power. This reality soon became the EAEU [Eurasian Economic Union]. Russia’s withdrawal from the Western-dominated institutions was obviously accelerated after 2022 as Russia began to actively get out of the dollar-based financial and trade structures, as well as to withdraw from a number of international treaties that were detrimental to Russia.
But the need to leave the American-centric system and create its own was dictated not only by the fact that the U.S. cannot and does not want to deal with Russia on an equal footing, but also by the fact that the Western financial system is collapsing. American financial elites tried to delay this collapse for many years following the 2008 financial crisis, printing endless amounts of “unsecured money.”
In 2020 and 2021, the American establishment decided to repeat the experience of the financial crisis and once again stimulate its already hopeless economy with new huge injections of liquidity. However, as the current statistics shows, this policy was effective only for a very short period of time and led the U.S. to a dead end. Since the fourth quarter of 2021, the situation in the U.S. economy has only continued to deteriorate. The most likely way out of the current crisis may be a rapid collapse of financial markets.
When and if this collapse happens, and the U.S. defaults on its debt, America’s GDP will collapse by at least 30% and the consumption level of households will fall by half. “In any case, the approaching crisis threatens to develop into a full-scale social and economic catastrophe, the scale of which will not be less than the Great Depression of the 1930s,” Glazyev said.
He insisted that this policy initially began with the abandoning of the gold reserve system in August of 1971, a policy which was then continued throughout the ’80s and beyond. The entire American economy is completely dependent on the continuation of the policy of quantitative easing. In the process of trying to delay its collapse, they may start unleashing major military conflicts around the world, as well as provoke various cataclysms, both man-made and socio-economic.
“It is now clear to everyone that it is no longer possible to avoid the onset of a catastrophe in the United States, which will later spread to the entire world and become global in nature. The only thing that can be done is to prepare for it,” Glazyev said.
“The Russian leader has repeatedly stated that the Americans’ unbridled desire to hold the entire world with one single pole of power is bound to lead to a catastrophe on a global scale, the beginning of which we are all already witnessing today. So everyone will soon realize that Putin was completely right,” Glazyev said.
After this crisis, a new economic system will be formed in the world. It will be integral. States and private banks will lose their private monopoly on the issue of money, and contracts will be concluded between sovereign countries on common grounds, not under pressure, as is currently happening, for example, between the United States and Europe.
