Russia is not some Zimbabwe-to-be. It's sitting on a surplus of foreign assets and very healthy foreign exchange reserves of around $375 billion. Moreover, it has a strong debt-to-GDP ratio of just 13% and a large (and steadily growing) stockpile of gold. This is why Russia will arrest the ruble's slide and keep pumping oil.

-Marin Katusa (Chief investment strategist for Casey Energy Investment (2014).)

You got that right Dr Katusa, and I hope that our friends and neighbors control their rage when they read it, because it is just what many of our finest citizens do not want to hear. ‘As right as the rain' – as it says in the opening line of the song from the brilliant American musical Bloomer Girl (1944) –  although the former scholar from the Stockholm School of Economics, Professor Anders Åslund, tells us to think of  Russia as though Joseph Stalin (aka Bob Steele to some of the disco crowd during my post-grad days in Stockholm) was still giving the orders, and the Russian economy was still grossly mismanaged and would soon disappear down the tube.

But I want to go further than Dr Katusa, because he touched on the key point in his short and important article. “Putin always thinks decades ahead!” was the way he put it. I consider it a good idea if readers of this contribution understand the meaning and value of this behavior.

In my book Scarcity, Energy and Economic Progress (1977), I say early on that population growth is going to be a major issue in the not too distant future, and the time to do something about it was NOW (meaning THEN). Understandably, that contention didn't go over so good, and so I only mentioned it en-passant in my later books and lectures. You see, in every society there are a number of inveterate gamblers and dreamers, and some of those players believe that huge populations will be good for their bank accounts and/or their ‘intimate lives'.