Vladislav Inozemtsev: Putin’s self-destructing economy
A little more than a year after “Black Tuesday,” when the ruble lost a quarter of its value in a day, the state of the Russian economy is still uncertain. During the past 12 months, gross domestic product declined 3.9 percent, less than many analysts anticipated a year ago, and the government managed to get inflation below 13 percent. But early official forecasts promising a return to growth by the third quarter of 2015 went unrealized, and subsequent projections of growth resuming later this year also look unrealistic.