Goldman Sachs: Russian Economy Is Doing Better Than Government Acknowledges

This is 60 minutes, hot on the trail.

This is 60 minutes, hot on the trail.

- Goldman Sachs presented an unbelievable, incredible, brilliant prospect for the Russian economy. Either they were hacked by Russian hackers, or it's really that good.

- Or we chose their president.

- It's not clear. Their data regarding our GDP growth in 2017-2019 are even better than those of our Russian Ministry of Economic Development. Pay attention to the figures. We must admit that we're still lagging behind the average world growth levels and from the speeds of the developing countries. But, nevertheless, Goldman Sachs makes such unbelievable predictions, +2,9% in 2019.

 

- And 3,3% in 2018!

- Versus 2,2% predicted by our experts.

- Well, it's quite incredible. There's a confirmation. It might have been this statistics that exchanges were so happy about. Today, the Moscow Exchange set a record. Well, it's not about this, regular people don't trade on exchanges. What interests a regular person? You always say, the Ministry of Economic Development makes up economic figures, Siluanov, together with Nabiullina, made up inflation. There are confirmations not only from rating companies, like Fitch Ratings, there are confirmations from the biggest banks. And they predict the economic growth for us, 3,3%, which, overall, is normal now, at the moment.

Dmitry Nekrasov, political scientist: This isn't impossible, I won't be impressed if it's 3,3%, but I don't really understand, I think there's a mistake, as I understand 3,3% for 2018, but I don't understand the figure for 2017, as we already know most of the data. It's much bigger than we counted here. However, 3,3%... You know, we had a 10% growth in 2000.

- It's clear, China has 7% now.

- In the 2000s, we had approximately 7-8%, 3,3 isn't much. We grow slower than the world…

- But it's good, don't you agree?

- Against the background of the past years, it's good.