Boris Vishnevsky’s blog at Ekho Moskvy website, 19.11.2014

At the All-Russia People’s Front forum [a movement founded by Vladimir Putin to replace the ruling United Russia party. Supported by well-known public persons loyal to Putin] Vladimir Putin stated that ruble’s fall shouldn’t upset the citizens of Russia too much.

Something like, “nothing at all has changed in the ruble zone for those who live in Russia”. Since “the ruble’s fall won’t influence those who buy Russian-manufactured goods and products. And Russia’s budget “has nothing but won due to the growth of rubble supply as a result of devaluation”.

State Commission for Academic Degrees and Titles, where are you? What has been quoted is quite enough to deprive Vladimir Putin, Doctor of Economics, of his title. For economic illiteracy.

The “foreign currency component” is built into the price of the overwhelming majority of “Russian-manufactured goods and products”. Since they are manufactured by means of imported equipment, imported raw materials, materials and technologies, the appropriate factories need imported computers an so on and so forth.

If it wasn’t like this the Russian-manufactured goods wouldn’t rise in price in recent months. But they do rise in price and everyone who goes shopping (Vladimir Putin is not one of those people) knows about it. If we reject the hypothesis that President is economically illiterate then we have to suppose that he has no idea of what is going on in the country.

It’s hard to say which hypothesis is worse.

By the way, if Vladimir Putin’s ratings of support are true, than all those 84 percent of citizens who eagerly support Putin and recklessly believe him will calm down tomorrow.

They will understand that they aren’t threatened with ruble’s fall, on the contrary, it’s good for the budget (it’s not actually clear why not drop ruble to microscopic quantity since the budget will benefit from it even more).

They will stop storming not only exchange offices but even shops buying up buckwheat (Russian-manufactured buckwheat by all means. Shops have already limited its sale to no more than five packs for one person). Only marginal liberals and radial oppositionists who don’t believe Putin will stand in a queue for it.

So, according to the percent of people who will believe that the ruble’s fall is not a bad thing and even a good one in some way and will act accordingly, we’ll find out Putin’s true rating.
It’ll be an exact measurement.