MOSCOW, March 4. /TASS/. The 2008 global financial crisis impaired Russia’s development plans, but the authorities then managed to prevent the economy from collapsing and the public’s savings from being wiped out, Russian President Vladimir Putin told TASS in an interview for its project entitled "20 Questions with Vladimir Putin".
While commenting on the fact that the goals of Strategy 2020 - adopted in 2008 - had failed to materialize, Putin said that those were preliminary plans. He recalled that by 2008, the task of doubling the GDP had been tackled and social forecasts were made accordingly, but with the onset of the global financial crisis, the authorities were facing a more urgent task - "to prevent the economy from collapsing and the public’s savings from being wiped out."
"This was in 2008. I became Prime Minister then and had to publicly announce - this was a huge risk, frankly speaking. I stated that I would prevent a repeat of the 1998 crisis, when all of the public’s savings had been wiped out… And we prevented that," Putin emphasized.
"The crisis did harm the country’s development," he acknowledged. "Honestly, here we were not to blame for that. That global financial meltdown and the economic crisis that followed it came from the outside," he stressed.
The peak of the global financial crisis began in the United States in the autumn of 2008. In Russia, fallout came mostly due to dwindling oil prices and foreign investors fleeing emerging markets. Whereas in 2007, Russia’s GDP was up 8.5%, in 2008 it came to 5.2%, with 2009 seeing a slump of 7.8% - the worst in 10 years. In November 2008, Putin, who was Russia’s prime minster at the time, approved an action plan for improving the economic situation. At the end of December, the government came up with a list of priority measures to fight the consequences of the crisis, for which 10 trillion rubles (then $340.4 bln) was earmarked. By 2010, Russia’s economy had rebounded, resuming growth (by 4.5%).
Prior to the 2008 credit crunch, Russia had endured the infamous 1998 economic crisis, when on August 17 of that year, a technical default was declared on all main government liabilities. The government then abandoned its policy of keeping a stable exchange rate of the ruble against the dollar.
Episode 8 of the video interview is available at https://putin.tass.ru/en.