Speaking at a plenary session of the Eastern Forum, Vladimir Putin said he sees no signs that economic growth in Russia is coming to a halt. In his account, what is happening is not a downturn but a “soft, calm landing” of the economy: after annual growth rates above 4%, the country is supposedly moving to more modest figures.
Putin argued that lending is not stopping and that the Central Bank, in his words, is successfully fighting inflation. From this, he concluded that there are no grounds to speak of stagnation.
He was responding to remarks by Sberbank head German Gref, whom he has known since their time in the St. Petersburg mayor’s office. A day earlier, Gref used the phrase “technical stagnation”, meaning that GDP growth had moved close to zero.
Gref also warned that it was time to move away from the economy’s “managed cooling”, a term previously used by Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, or the consequences could become more severe.
At the same time, the head of Sberbank was not the first senior official in recent months to speak publicly about economic problems. In June, at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Economy Minister Maxim Reshetnikov said:
“We seem to be, in general, already on the verge of sliding into a recession.”
At the same forum, Bank of Russia chair Elvira Nabiullina backed that assessment, saying that the previous sources of growth had been exhausted and that the country needed to consider “some new model of growth.”
As the article notes, the summer months that followed showed how far the earlier resources for economic growth had in fact been depleted.