At the risk of losing even more hard-won karma points, yeah. Now that it's been a few days and not so many drive-by downvoters are likely to notice. I don't k

At the risk of losing even more hard-won karma points, yeah. Now that it's been a few days and not so many drive-by downvoters are likely to notice. I don't know how things really are in the Russian economy -- propaganda is a hell of a drug, after all. All that I know for sure is that Russia has been "about to fall" for 140ish days according to the media, and it keeps not falling (and their currency is appreciating pretty well and has been the strongest major world currency for much of the summer). However, Western economies are actually doing quite badly, and the Russian war is a significant (but not the only) contributor to that. Europe is in a major energy crunch -- countries in the EU (especially Germany) are sufficiently worried about mass-casualty events caused by energy shortages over winter that they're taking extraordinary measures, including both reactivating long-idled coal power stations and making select train services free to encourage commuters not to use additional energy driving. Europe is enduring high inflation -- and particularly a very tight food market which is in danger of collapse over the winter. In an effort to offset that, the EU has begun importing foodstuffs from the US in larger quantities, including some items that normally are not seen as meeting the EU guidelines. As a result, even against the not-so-hot US dollar, the Euro has declined precipitously -- briefly crossing USD parity. Meanwhile here in the US, we have an increasing everything-shortage, the highest inflation in four decades, and an economy in recession. America will be able to feed it's people this winter, unless it exports a lot more food to Europe, but food prices are continuing to spiral out of control upward as many foodstuffs just aren't available in sufficient quantities to satisfy demand at ~any price. On top of all that, Western economies are trying to raise their central-bank interest rates to rein in inflation -- but the economies are all so dependant upon debt and deficit to remain afloat that monetary policy is heavily constrained (if interest rates were raised to the inflation rate -- generally the minimum intervention that would actually stop inflation -- then the interest on the debt would immediately decimate the government budget, due to catastrophic debt levels (which have little to do with the war)) So, ya, it's not like we are doing that well over here either -- but our propaganda says we are on the verge of victory -- just like Russia's propaganda says about them.