Quote (Black XistenZ @ Apr 14 2024 07:12am)
One important caveat to keep in mind regarding the collapse of wartime economies: the famous hyperinflation in Germany after WWII was not just caused by the end of the war per se - the nazis had engaged in unsustainably high levels of spending while they ramped up the arms industry and the infrastructure spending. Their economy policies were geared toward waging war from the get go. Nazi Germany had a rapine economy which crucially hinged on extracting resources out of occupied countries and on exploiting an army of forced laborers. Estimates for late August of 1944 are that one quarter of Germany's entire labor force consisted of foreigners who were de facto enslaved.
Huge amounts of money printing plus the loss off all the resources and labor caused the hyperinflation, which also affected other places in Europe. E.g. the famous Pengö inflation in Hungary which peaked at an annualized rate of (2.9 x 10^177)%; the successor currency Forint was exchanged to Pengö at a rate of 1 Forint = 400 octillion Pengö (400 x 10^27).
The point I'm trying to make with my rambling is that the end of a war only causes an economic collapse if the underlying economic conditions had already been highly unsustainable. This is decidedly not the case in Russia right now. There will be inflation eventually, yes, and the common Russians will suffer significant opportunity costs from all the spending going toward the war effort rather than them. However, Russia continues to hold vast amounts of natural resources that other countries in the world will gladly buy, and the Russian economy keeps sputtering along mostly like it used to before the war. You don't have crops in the fields left to rot because their entire workforce is in the arms factories, you don't have mass conscription which sucks up a huge chunk of their working-age population to send them to the trenches or anything like that.
Russia has permanently become China's bitch due to this war, and they have imho pissed away some 10% of their wealth in the long run by alienating the best customer for their natural gas (for which there's no easy alternative customer), but nothing they couldn't absorb.
really underrated point when it comes to the start of the invasion of poland
many people were against it, the military wanted more time, but the nazi regime was BEYOND broke already
typical socialists, every penny was spent, credit maxed out, they even introduced a promissory note system, which they had to pay back
thats why the war started when it did