Putin His Finger on The Problem

Vlad, the Impaler, is a half wit.  That is to say, he's witty, and half right. "They are living like parasites off the global economy and their monopoly of the dollar", is what he said. 

The problem, as this endeavor has made its main theme, is that It's the Distribution, Stupid.  Without the USofA sucking up all that widget production from the Third World (and Russia is very Third World), all those oligarches and autocrats would have no place to dump all those widgets.  Fact is, the relationship is symbiotic. 

I'll repeat the quote, extended:
As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth ... to provide men with buying power. ... Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. ... The other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.
-- Marriner Eccles

Services, of course, as I've penned a bit about recently, are difficult to value.  They also tend to be bought by corporations, and less by consumers.  Is one systems analyst worth one iPad 2 or three?  I wonder whether anyone would really trade any service for physical product.  Ask yourself.

For those who don't recall, Eccles was FDR's Fed chairman, and later founded a think tank.  A digression:  follow the Bretton Woods link in his article, and you will find this juicy bit, "The chief features of the Bretton Woods system were an obligation for each country to adopt a monetary policy that maintained the exchange rate by tying its currency to the U.S. dollar ...".  In other words, we gave Europe the Marshall Plan, and we took control of the planet's money.  This fact has irritated many for more than half a century.  And this Gerrymandered system is largely what made America Exceptional, until 1973 when the Arabs figured out that the au courant currency was black gold, Texas Tea.

I suspect what gets in Putin's craw is that much of the production in the Third World (and China is very much Third World) is owned by American (titularly, anyway) corporations.