My Talking Head...

 ... about same ol', same ol'. 

Plus, with a smug smile on my face, I present to you my vindication in geostrategic narrative of the last very many years, by the same major intellectual magazine which liked very much my last book and now writes what I preached for decades, actually...

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the question of the size of the Russian and Chinese economies—relative to Western economies—has become highly significant. Early on, policymakers compared the Russian GDP to that of Spain or Italy, for example, as a way of minimizing its global importance. Now that these geopolitical tensions have resurrected Cold War blocs, it is crucial to clarify our understanding of the real size and importance of these economies.

It is behind the paywall, but, boy how much I wrote on the size of Russian and Western economies in the last nine years in this blog. How about that 7 years ago. 

Anyone with a common sense, forget good understanding of the economics, which is not really a science, knows that absolute GDP measured in constant dollars is a misleading number. That is why anyone with the brain--from serious economists who abhorre all those BS monetarist, detached from real life, theories to serious intelligence and analytical organizations, use much more (still inaccurate) accurate metric--GDP based on PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) which does reflect what is, so to speak, real depth of the economy. Even a brief look at PPP comparisons between Russia's and Australia's economies show a peculiar number which tells us that, rephrasing our "specialist" and "diplomat" (a diplomatic tour in Indonesia surely makes one competent on Russia, wink-wink) "the Russian economy is approximately three times the size as Australia", in reality--much larger. Well, if we also concentrate on the last underlined row at the very bottom of the both tables we will see that shares of Global GDP based on PPP also relate to each-other as approximately 3.1 to 1 in Russia's favor. 

But what do I really know, I never attended 4-year long "Economics BS Central" in the Ivy League Taliban schools. Just saying...  Enjoy, if you will.