Tela Network

/ The state functionally went bankrupt, and was dissolved in what amounts to essentially a corporate-sovereign restructuring. Starting in the 1970s and accelerating thereafter, the Soviet growth model - extensive capital accumulation poured into new urban factories, power plants, steel mills, and machine tools - had effectively run out of low-hanging investment opportunities, resulting in persistently diminishing marginal growth potential. / A total lack of ... creative destruction on one side, and ballooning imperial obligations on the other. / To paper over these holes, the Soviet Union financed its civilian consumption and military spending - along with the subsidies it paid to its puppets - through oil rents made possible by the global energy crisis of the 1970s. But when oil prices normalized again in the mid-1980s, the regime was forced onto international debt markets, where it was eventually strangled. / https://boydinstitute.org/p/debt-killed-the-soviet-empire