Comments by "Louis Giokas" (@louisgiokas2206) on "Russian Economy is Soaring - The Economist's Claim" video.

GDP is, in general, a flawed measure. It is totally invalid to use GDP to compare economies in very different situations, or that have very different system of political economy. For example, to compare a country at war, like Russia, to the rest of Europe is clearly invalid. Another example is China. There, in addition to the clear manipulation of the numbers, one also has the fact that it is a centrally controlled economy. In fact, much of the growth of the Chinese economy has been counterproductive. Sure, they have all that High-Speed Rail (HSR). That goosed their GDP, but now the system is $1T in debt and that debt is only growing. The same with the whole property sector debacle. Yes, that increased GDP for a while. Now they are overbuilt by, some say, up to 100%. Now it is dragging down GDP. In fact, there is no way that China has GDP growth when consumption is anemic, and the property sector is going bust. Those are two of the three pillars of the economy. People who have studied this in some detail believe that they are actually in recession in GDP terms. Even the prior premier of China, an economist by education, Li Keqiang, stated that he did not trust the numbers. To expect anything different from Russia, an oligarchic kleptocracy, is the height of madness. I agree with you about the Economist. I used to read it avidly as well, then I started to notice a lot of stuff I was familiar with which was just plain wrong.
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You are correct about how BRICS started. You mischaracterize it as "warm fuzzy" etc. It was nothing of the sort. That is not New York or Wall Street. There are no "warm fuzzes" there. What BRICS was meant to be was a group of large developing countries which made sense as a group for investment purposes. They were at similar levels of development and growth. That is it, all there is. It is akin to the Asian Tigers as a group of countries from an investment point of view.
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