Yves here. Richard Murphy’s recent post, Why Britain Stopped Making, attracted a good deal of commentary, with some readers arguing that Murphy was unduly polemical. Colonel Smithers sent along this article, which is a follow-on of sorts and a very fine piece. Here, Murphy argues that the UK sufferd a dual curse, the classic resource curse during its North Sea oil exploitation period, and its finance curse.
Some had criticized Murphy’s earlier piece, contending that there was no way for the UK to reverse the decline of its industry. The fact that Russia with its protracted under-investment in the later USSR years, and then kicked down even further during the Western looting in the 1990, has been able to turn itself around impressively from an even lower baseline, disproves these assertions. The UK could have pulled itself out of its accelerating nosedive. Its leaders chose not to.
By Richard Murphy, Emeritus Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School and a director of Tax Research LLP. Originally published at Funding the Future
For more than 45 years, the UK has suffered not one, but two economic curses: the resource curse and the finance curse. Both were chosen, primarily by Margaret Thatcher, and both inflated the pound, destroyed industry, and left Britain dependent on hot money and speculation. In this video, I explain how we got here — and what we must do to rebuild a real economy based on work, fair reward and democracy.
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
The UK has been financially cursed for more than 45 years, and for once, I am not talking about antisocial neoliberalism. I am instead talking about two forms of curse that are widely recognised within economics, and they are called the ”Resource Curse” and the ”Finance Curse”. Both of them create a strong and overvalued pound. Both of them have attracted hot money into the UK, and they have broken our economy by choice.
The term, the ‘Resource Curse’ was created by an economist, Richard Auty, in 1993. He used it to describe countries with abundant natural resources, who often, as a result, grew more slowly and less fairly than countries who were not blessed in that way with oil, gas, coal, mineral rights, timber, or even fishing. The UK is rarely described as having suffered a ‘Resource Curse’, but of course it did. We had an abundance of oil and gas from the late 1970s and early 1980s onwards, and as a result, we should recognise that this term, usually applied to developing countries, and also the Netherlands, applies equally to us.
The choice that was made by Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s, when she realised that she was going to have the most phenomenal inflow of funds from the seas, largely off Scotland, was not accidental. She chose to pursue a deliberate political project, and we still live with the consequences of that.
Thatcher inherited a windfall. North Sea oil and gas delivered it. Few governments have ever had luck on that scale, and she blew it.
She could have modernised manufacturing.
She could have rebuilt infrastructure.
She could have created a sovereign wealth fund, as Norway did.
And she could have renewed the industrial fabric of this country, making it suitable and fit for future generations, but she didn’t.
She funded mass unemployment.
She funded the destruction of British industry, quite deliberately.
She funded tax cuts for the wealthy.
She sustained industrial closure.
And she expanded the impact of the City of London upon our economy.
She quite literally burned our future to fund her neoliberal dream.
Sterling was pushed upward in value by the demand for oil, and the pound, in fact, rose in value and was maintained above value until 2008 as a consequence. Oil did this at first, and then, when oil began to fall in terms of its significance within the UK economy, Gordon Brown ensured that we suffered a ‘Finance Curse’ instead, and kept sterling overvalued as a result for far longer than it should have been.
An overvalued pound makes our exports uncompetitive.
It means that the UK cost base rises when compared to our competitors.
And it means that imports can price out homemade products.
The consequence of the overvalued pound created by oil, and then the hot money in the City of London, has been that many industrial sectors in the UK have collapsed: shipbuilding, steel, engineering, textiles, and electronics. In all cases, these have been largely eliminated from the UK economy. It’s as if we’ve forgotten how to make anything but things that are financially engineered.
The government blamed the unions for what happened. They claimed that British business was inefficient, and I don’t deny it. British business was not in a great place in the late 1970s, but the opportunity to rebuild was provided by oil and was blown. The inflated exchange rate dealt the death blow to whatever was left of British business and currency policy by overflating the value of the pound was used as the hidden weapon of destruction that Thatcher unleashed upon the people of the UK.
By creating a financial revolution – the ‘Big Bang’, as she called it in 1986 – which led to deregulation of the City of London and the expansion of our tax haven-linked entities through places like Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and others, all of whom have a habit of putting the King’s head on their stamps, we got a model for our international finance that depended upon hot money flowing into the UK.
So what is hot money? It is sometimes illicit funds, and sometimes it’s just excess monies held by speculators who are looking for the biggest return, subject to the lowest rate of tax and the lowest level of scrutiny and regulation. That’s what the City of London provided as a result of Margaret Thatcher’s choice, which no one has ever overturned since.
Until the 1970s, we made things in the UK. Since 2000, we’ve only been exporting financial claims. We are now dependent upon hot money to keep the UK economy in balance. The sectoral balance data shows that. Real work was replaced as a consequence by rent extraction.
And for 40 years, the Bank of England has reinforced this strategy. It continues to hold rates too high, for example, by undertaking quantitative tightening at the moment, which might increase the real rate of interest being paid by the government and everybody else in the UK by nearly 1% per annum, which is significant when the Bank of England base rate is only 4%.
It has overinflated the value of our pound as a consequence.
It has increased our UK cost base.
And it has deepened de-industrialisation as a result.
And all of this is still going on today because the Bank of England wants it that way. They focus their attention on the City. We should be looking elsewhere.
And we’re still addicted to speculative inflows into this country, and the Labour Party is encouraging them. It calls them foreign direct investment, but that’s just a polite term for selling anything of value in the UK to foreigners at an underprice to grab hold of their money. We are not actually, again, making things; we’re just flogging off what is left.
The consequence is clear. Industry is still paying. What we have left is suffering because exporters are squeezed. Investment is discouraged by the high price of borrowing. Production is offshored, and trade deficits are run because of policy and not because they’re necessary.
Meanwhile, the regions of the UK where industry used to be have been hollowed out as London has centralised wealth.
The result is that democracy has also been hollowed out. Governments fear markets and not citizens. Fiscal rules reassure investors rather than meet needs, and finance is treated as the master and not as the servant.
So what should we be doing?
We must break the residue of both these curses.
We must stop believing that hot money dependence can create prosperity.
And finance must become a public utility again.
We have to end quantitative tightening.
And we have to stop using interest rates as a proxy for industrial policy when they actually deliver industrial destruction. Instead, we must set interest rates in this country for the benefit of the people who live here and our domestic reality, and not for the benefit of foreign capital.
That means that we must also build a modern industrial strategy with a competitive pound at its core, and that is the only basis on which we can build full employment based on lower borrowing costs. And we must create public banks to fund real investment when those we have will not do so.
We have another issue that we have to address as well. I have spent the last quarter of a century talking about the risks from the UK’s tax haven infrastructure, and I stand by all the analysis that I’ve ever presented on that issue, which once dominated my life. We still have to dismantle that infrastructure now because it still exists to undermine our democracy and to support the destruction that our finance-focused economy creates. We must build an economy based on real work, fair reward, and democratic control and not on the pretence that these tax haven structures put in their place.
We need to move forward, and we can’t while we’re suffering these curses, which were chosen deliberately by our governments. We need governments that choose not to curse us all, but to work with us for our future prosperity. That has to be the core of where we go as a nation, as we abandon everything that antisocial neoliberalism has delivered to us.
Didn’t Lenin write somewhere about “finance capitalism” as the inevitable, final stage of capitalism? Is that different from the ”Finance Curse”?
No, it’s exactly the same but economists can hardly admit that Lenin was right all along. Especially as people might then read his April Thesis
Marx did opine that M-C-M would invariably would become M-M due to incentives and environmental market conditions that would set the stage.
Thanks for this post.
I’ve heard the UK’s tax haven isles referred to as ‘the undead british empire’, or the UBE. Said mostly in jest… I think.
I left the UK in the early sixties, after working as a road tester for BSA and then Norton. Both were well respected around the world and the UK. The USA was looking for Brit mechanics who better understood these bikes than Harley mechanics. Each time I went back for a visit they became less enjoyable, with a free airline ticket offered currently being left unused. Finance is only a small part in this case.
The rise of social policy crash diving to the point of 90,000 being arrested for seemingly mild social comments online, is just one item, there and others. Poor old blighty, my heart bleeds.
I had a Norton Commando, built in the 1970s. In terms of handling it was the best bike ever, but compared to the Japanese offerings it was a dead loss: no electric start so you had to get the top-dead-centre kick just right or suffer the consequences, Amal carbs which stuck, and Lucas electricals which drained the battery if you used the headlight.
It would have reqired a real industrial policy, consistent for a generation, to fix all that. And how do we achieve a consistent industrial policy if the govt changes every 4/5 years?
There was a grace to those bikes. Riding one was freedom and smoothness back 50+ years ago. Thrills, too, like blasting by my elementary school at 110! Luck helped.
The name was just coincidental. :)
Only ever owned one bike — 89 K100RS.
Still have it. My body will give out before it does.
The house we live in now was owned before by chairman of the Norton owners club. Two lovely old bikes in the garage when we viewed it.
That plus a small chalk board I still have in the garage that is covered in track names and numbers, brooklands, brands, s/stone. And a few for obvious roads like A6 and A1M . (170) . If it’s what I think it is that means 170 mph on the public road. Can’t have been on an old Norton though surely?
The race circuit speeds look far more sane anywhere from 82 brooklands to 120s
Previous owner had the house from the 50s so I can believe it.
…..he writes …In 1986 Thatcher deregulated the City of London…this is factually incorrect….the City of London is a separate physical entity from the rest of England. It has its own laws separate from the rest of the banking that takes place in London.
The City of London is/was totally corrupt, the sink for dirty money the world over. It is corrupt and that is why dirty money, drug money, Ukraine dirty is and always will flow into this private enclave in London.
Charles III , after his coronation, requested permission to enter the City of London. The Lord Mayor of the City of London accepted his entry. King Charles III is not the king of the city of London and none of the laws that exist for the rest of England operate within the City of London unless the Lord Mayor of London gives permission.
The underlying strength of the financial center that is London, tests on dirty, corrupt money.
Why did Russian oligarchy money flow into London. Why did middle East oil money flow into London. Simply because all transactions are secret. It’s another country, independent of the rest of England.
It is the source of financial corruption in London.
Yes, that statement is the sort of imprecision that drives me nuts. Thanks for highlighting it.
The US analogue is depicting the formal ending of Glass Steagall as meaningful. It was already shot full of holes. Commercial bank Credit Suisse acquired bulge bracket investment bank First Boston in 1988, long before Glass Steagall was officially put to rest.
Luongo and Krainer work all that into every podcast they’re on.
good comment and observation… i too am surprised the author is unaware of all this…
No matter how much reverence there is for Margaret Thatcher in some circles, it is only time that is revealing how much damage she did to the UK based solely on ideological reasons. With the North Sea oil and gas fields, she could have set up the UK for the future leaving a legacy that any Prime Minister would have been proud of. I do not think that it is a stretch to say that the UK of 2025 is her real legacy. It didn’t have to be this way but she chose rich people to be the winners and poor people to be the losers because that is the sort of person she was.
Her policy flows naturally from the underlying assumption that there’s no such thing as society.
I remember being part of many pretty optimistic discussions in the mid to late sixties and throughout the seventies within the trades union movement about the possibililty that the North Sea could be a blessing by enabling us to offer cheap energy for our industries, and the wherewithall to finance modernisation of old industries and to develop new ones through state controlled investment banks (called as I remember the Industrial Reconstruction (or Reorganisation) Corporation) which would supply cheap investment capital on a utility basis in the form of grants or loans to projects, some with a opportunties for relatively stable returns over time, and some “it seemed a good idea at the time” projects to encourage the creation and exploration of new technologies and, hopefully, develop new industries through the involvement of universities, the various industrial and regional organs of the National Eonomic Development Organisation, and people with a few ideas and a decent presentation of a proposal.
Some of the revenues would be used to strengthen the welfare state including the NHS, the education system to upgrade the public sector as part of what became known as the “social contract” designed to curb wage demands during a period of severe inflation.
Much time was consumed by working out ways in which we could avoid sterling, to the greatest extent possible, becoming a petro-currency. That was the largest conceptual stumbling block becuse Sterling was still a reserve currency throughout much of the Empire and Commonwealth.
Both the trouble, and the opportunity, lay in the length of time it would take to bring enough oil onstream for it to begin to have a positive effect on the British public. We had a Labour government which, like most governments, was trying to cope with the growth of stagflation resulting from the severing of the US dollar from gold and, as workers struggled to keep up with inflation, we had many wildcat strikes and a tidy few official strikes. The key to the future was: would the Tories or Labour or a split parliament form the government that would experience the immediate benefits when the oil started to flow. The view at the time was the party in power when the oil came through would end up serving for the at least the next three parliaments. The Tories managed four.
The likelihood of strikes throughout the winter months was why everyone with an sense of reality at the TUC’s Annual Congress in Britain in 1978 expected Jim Callaghan, the Labour prime minister, to announce an election when he made his formal speech to the Conference on, I believe, the Tuesday, but he did not, and he missed the country’s last oportunity to stop Thatcher’s inner circle from using oil to fundamentally change the country by allowing the £ to float ever higher, throwing money at the newly unemployed and allowing – and encouraging – council house tenants to buy at a significant discounts the local authority owned housing in which they were tenants. And after that, everything went downhill and there is no easy way up from the place we are in.
As an aside, I think that Callaghan had already made up his mind before the TUC conference that he was going to hold on to the following year and saw this, for factional reasons, as an election Labour should lose, although every union leader present at the dinner the dinner he enjoyed with them on the previous Sunday led them all to believe that he would announce an election on the folllowing Thursday when all three television channels were booked for a Prime ministerial message.
I agree with Richard’s diagnosis, but where are the people, the party, that will put his prognosis into effect? The experience of the seventies taught me three lessons: you need the right people, who are in short supply, in power or things will just slide along as they are now. If you want a future in which you can do better than your parents emigrate to Russia or China, or failing that, just keep reminding yourself that one day you will free yourself from this septic isle and die, and that might be your luckiest day.
Great post, bertl. Very informative.
We can’t just give up. There have been moments during Gaza that I felt I would rather be dead than American. But there are still good things here, as I am sure there are in the UK.
@bertl at 9:42 am
”…where are the people, the party, that will put his prognosis into effect? The experience of the seventies taught me three lessons: you need the right people, who are in short supply, in power or things will just slide along as they are now…”
Excellent observation.
In my opinion if you have the right people in charge plenty can be done to rectify the economic and social problems most of our countries face (I live in Canada). All countries require energy, food, housing, transportation, medicines, healthcare, childcare, eldercare, etc. Those essential areas provide lots of fodder for economic development, some of it protected, some not. It was done post WW2 and could be done again quite easily with a little thought, planning and government direct intervention. BUT if your country is led by garden gnomes loyal to US neo-liberalism as so many are in the West it won’t happen. It’s up to us to dislodge and replace them…
bertl, thank you for this super post.
>>>Until the 1970s, we made things in the UK.
three of the death by 1000 cuts elements…..post-WW2 austerity, horrid labour-management relations (both sides were in the wrong), the UK essentially wasted ginormous leads in post-WW2 tech: eg, computers/software, commercial jets (see the Comet’s doomed window design),
no doubt the British could have taken some steps to limit the collapse of manufacturing,but their higher wages compared to China and their dearth of natural resources compared to Russia would inevitably have acted as serious constraints to any such efforts. that Britain accelerated the collapse of manufacturing is obvious. Whether the longer term outcome would have been any different is not obvious at all.
I disagree. You would need to provide some evidence for your claim. Just because a country has higher wages, does not mean that manufacturing “inevitably” goes away. There are many more factors that are in play. The article and comments here talk about some of them, so please do provide some back-up to your claim.
To confirm JonnyJames, I have had many C level contacts tell me that the case for offshoring at their company was weak or non-existant if you factored in risks but they announced it to boost the stock price.
For instance, an exec at Ethan Allen told me there was no economic case for offshoring. They could achieve the same savings by implementing just-in-time practices at their US operation. But the CEO went ahead anyhow.
More geneally, offshoring does not produce labor savings. It represents a transfer from factory floor workers to much higher paid supervisors and managers, who now have more coordination tasks.
Executive boards seem to be made up of sheep. Whatever the current fad in business is they always jump on the band wagon even if it is inappropriate for their business. It’s like they want to show everyone they are forward thinking and implementing the newest ideas.
That happened with offshoring as soon as some companies did it. It’s happening now with AI with every company saying they are implementing it (even if they are not) and even if it doesn’t help their business.
Even saw it when ap stores became popular. Some companies tried to rebrand whatever they did as apps.
A very good, strong article.
But it doesn’t discuss Privatization as the great accursed destabilizer — above all of Thatcher’s privatizing council housing and vastly raising the housing costs that wage earners had to pay — and hence, what their employers had to cover.
Public utilities were sold off and privatized, turning the entire economy into a model epitomized by Thames Water. Yes, interest rates were high — but that didn’t deter debt leveraged buyouts of the public infrastructure being sold off — starting as giveaway prices for British Telecom. (Thatcher’s motto: Sorry you’ve lost your housing and your job. I hope you’ve made a killing in the stock market.)
Thank you Mr Hudson for that refresher on history, like Thatcher’s first act in Cabinet raising Hayek’s book aloft and saying this it the path for the nation, totally ignorant about all things economics and worse functional monetary/market finance in its day. It was nothing more than an ideological scam by its proponents [elites]. Now the entire West is crumbling due to decades of neoliberalism path dependency and how after so many decades the entire academic back drop of these nations have been groomed. Worse all the social networks act as filters to keep out anyone not on the same page for the grand agenda.
Sux to watch …
Tucker Carlson draws a good parallel in his latest interview of Pierce Morgan when talking about London economy. Half are bankers producing debt and the other half supplies them food. How can a country survive with such economy long-term? I would add that going to war with your major clients (Russians) and threatening many others (i.e Chinese) is the best way to destroy that economy. That will send unemployed bankers to supermarkets and those who supplied them with food to streets. And those having money to emigration.
Yves, I would argue that Russia turnaround was at least a bit easier when you can rely on colossal amount of natural resources and energy and sheer geographical size.
Yea, UK never had vast lands brimful of resources under its control. If it had, it would surely be smarter than those Ruskies, and come up with some kind of great game that it would not mess up.
Also the UK has been fairly happy until recently to be in tow of the US empire that many view as the natural successor to the British Empire and getting outsized advantages compared to its real geopolitical and economic weight so the urge to turn things around was not particularly strong also for this reason.
HUH?!?!
There is NO comparison between the condition of the UK and that of Russia circa 2000. To suggest they faced similar-level difficulties and Russia was better off due to possessing more resources is false.
The UK was an advanced economy. Russia (the USSR before) had been deterioriating for decades and in the midst of a collapse so severe it was at risk of becoming a failed state. The Russian prospects were an order of magnitude or two worse than what the UK faced circa the early 1980s.
You ALSO miss its natural resources had been looted. I had the USSR-born, then American citizen Len Blavatnik briefly as a client. He worked in software at Macy’s before getting a Harvard MBA, now worth over $25 billion. He made his initial big kill expropirating Russian alumunim processing and mines, and then moving into energy and oil.
See this section from The Death of a Nation. I suggest you read it in full and sober up:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/00-Death-of-a-Nation.pdf
Yves, I do not deny the horrendous status of the Russian economy, many years ago, I listened to a very long podcast about the disaster of Gaidar premiership, al I wanted to say is that Russia at least has some “basic physical ingredients” so to speak if there was the political will to turn things around and kick the looters to the curb but, yes, it took some heavy lifting to do, for the UK, no matter how hard they try, it could be simply too late.
Same in early Netherlands. Finance securitized everything, industry declined, cities decayed; then the financiers packed up and left for London.
The Netherlands disease?
I was in London in 1987. The fountain in Trafalgar Square was undergoing maintenance. So, it was fenced off with towering panels. There was a cartoon of Thatcher drawn on some of the panels: her face depicted as the head of a bomber plane. She was dropping bombs on all of the UK social programs. Never forgot that image.
She certainly did more lasting damage than the Blitz, didn’t she?
I’m with Declan McManus where Maggie is concerned — tramp the dirt down.
Overvalued sterling? Piffle! It’s been the weakest major currency since 1945. The period 1980-2000 was a bounce in a bear market (helped by the costs of German reunification as well as oil).
The hard fact is that if the UK consumes more than it earns it will continue to become poorer and debasing the currency is the way to try and mask it. Accelerating the currency decline via cutting interest rates hastens the rate of impoverishment and favours those who invest abroad rather than local workers.
How to divvy up the decline between social classes is a secondary issue. Manufacturing has to be internationally competitive, and will only revive when UK workers get paid the same as Chinese workers or English lawyers earn like Indian ones…
No Making Shit Up.
First, the pound traded within the same very wide band from the early-mid 1980s till about 2015. The period Murphy is concerence with are when neoliberalism took hold, as in the 1970s and 1970s. The 1970s were an anomaly for USD v. other currencies due to the severity of our stagflation. The US even issued so-called Carter bonds, as on ones denominted in DM then:
Second, a comparison to the yen also undermines your claim:
Third, sterling having fallen does not make it not overvalued. Again see Japan. Japan’s currency was weak even when it was running persistent trade surpluses. It’s now risen despite trade deficits gapping out. Trade flows represent <5% of total foreign exchange flows. Investment transactions dominate. FX rates are generally considered mainly to reflect interest rate differentials.
Ahem, isn’t your JPY graph upsdie down? When JPY < 100 it means the Yen is Strong.
Although I agree that short term fluctuations happen for all sorts of reasons, the persistent weak trend of sterling has to be measuring something. In my view it is a recognition of worsening terms of trade allied with a political inability to say no to unearned wage increases which then have to be quietly removed by enabling FX weakness.
The worst part is that expected sterling weakness encourages the monied classes and even pension wealth to invest abroad and so the weakness goes on.
Normally I wouldn’t comment here but the comparison with the sovjet union collapse and Russia’s resurrection is interesting. On YT there was a very good talk, with a comical touch on why Russia managed to recover. I still remember the key points. You need a few key points to rebuild your economy: housing, mobility, industry, natural resources and fossil fuels.
First everyone in the Russia became owner of his house. So there was no tragedy of massive homelessness. In the west, UK and EU most rent or buy with a loan. If the currency falls and a loaf of bread cost millions what will happen with the housing market? If money is worth nothing and you have massive unemployment how will citizens afford housing?
Second, the sovjets lived mostly in cities. Which makes mobility convenient. Here most live outside cities and are dependent on private mobility. Which wouldn’t be affordable or lack of fuel.
Third, we have no oil and gas. Without energy you can power an economy. We need imports and just like I started, if money isn’t worth anything we no longer can afford energy.
Fourth, Russia had a large industrial base. We rely on imports for good, which we no longer can afford. That leaves us with manufacturing everything ourselves, as we become low wage labor. But we lack an industry.
Fifth, they manufacture you need natural resources which we don’t really have.
Russia was self-sufficient and because of that it could recover in such a short time. Can we still turn it around? Yes it is possible, but not with these incompetent leaders. If we wait until the system collapse, as in EU collapsing which will if we keep going in this direction, then we are doomed.
But I predicted the de-industrialization in 2002. It was a logical that when you start free trade with nations that are less regulated, cheaper labor, lower value currency that factories with leave. Until then economies were protected, living costs used to be in balance with labor costs. Free trade caused an imbalance. By exporting we created external deflation but internal inflation kept going up. For a short while we benefited from it, our total living cost went down. Side effect was stagnation of real wages while internal inflation went up but we still profited from it. But now internal inflation went up so much that we no longer profit. The problem is that everything we couldn’t export, like the state itself, education, healthcare,.. has become unaffordable. Because stagnated wages governments lost tax revenue, in combination with highly productive industry. To restore the balance of the 80′ and 90’s real wages should be x2, x3 higher. Annual income versus real estate has gone up 4 times. So I have little faith we can turn it around because it’s so complex. We could sacrifice a few generation like China did, offer the world cheap labor, cheap energy, few regulation so industry moves back. Be ready to work 70 hours a week for little £ and €.
Making Shit Up is a violation of our witten site Policies.
You really put your foot in your mouth and chewed. The UK had energy, as in North Sea oil. It is even mentioned in the post. So you did not read the post in full, which is a second violation of our written site Policies.
There was mass homelessness in the 1990s:
https://www.rbth.com/society/2013/10/08/living_without_address_moscows_homeless_tell_their_stories_30607.html
When employment collapsed in the 1990s, many sold their privatized flats without buying another, and wound up homeless when the money ran out.
As for natural resources, they were bought up on the cheap by men who became oligarchs, some of whom were Western (see my example of Len Blavatnik) or were actual or planned partners of major Western interests. And it was generally more profitable to sell Russian resources on world markets at world prices rather than focus on industrial rebuilding.
To put it another way, Russia was even more under the thrall of neoliberaism in the 1990s than the UK under Thatcher. So its resources would not be used to advance an industrial policy any more than North Sea oil wealth was.
Please read the extract from The Death of a Nation in this thread.
Since you are not adverse to some YT talks I suggest you have a look at this one – Multipolarity: The Six Ages Of China.
In case you don’t understand why I would link to something about China WRT the post above and currant discussion about Russia. I would point out how so many in the Westren Orthodox macroeconomic camp got it all wrong, worst tried to influence investors, gaslight entire populations, whilst they all implode.
Philip acknowledges how he was influence “back in the day” by the likes of Michael Pettis etc. – American economist. In this, as he unpacks, a study done for the firm he worked for at the time, how it was influenced, luckily portfolio decisions did not reflect its conclusions. What – is – important here is they acknowledged the studies failures. Due to that they went and look at why it failed, more so they did a comprehensive study of how China’s economy actually works. This is also applicable to Russia IMO e.g why so many Value[tm] based Westren Orthodox economic/econometric theories are going splat … worst just the opposite intended?
Hete is a good article from CEPR:
https://cepr.net/publications/honduras-us-officials-should-not-intervene-in-other-countries-elections
It says that the actions of trump and Salazar violate the charter of the OAS