Sanctions on Russia are working. Patience is needed

Since the beginning of the war, the Russian Central Bank has been introducing draconian currency controls and restrictions that have effectively ended the free trade of the Russian currency – as The Wall Street Journal says, the ruble was put into a "Central Bank-induced coma". [...] The other reason is that official accounting of food prices dynamics is non- transparent and probably manipulated – there were many media publications in the past decade (particularly since 2014, when inflation spiked following the invasion of Ukraine and collapse of the oil prices) when journalists actually tracked the prices of basic food items and found the dynamics to be much higher than the o. [...] However, the construction boom recorded in the beginning of 2022 is long gone; while in the first and second quarters of 2022 commissioning of residential buildings stood at 65 and 25 percent year-on-year respectively, it fell to just 1,7 percent in the third quarter, and to 11 percent in October, so the trend in the construction sector is clear. [...] Excessive credit burden on the background of falling incomes leads to deteriorating solvency of the Russians: in October, overdue consumer loan payments have reached a record of RUR 631 billion, or almost 12% of the total number of consumer loans and about 8,5% of the total volume. [...] Many surveys of the results of food embargo imposed in 2014 against Western food and agricultural products suggest that their main results were growth in prices, decrease of quality of food, and emergence of state-backed monopolies like Miratorg which reap most of the benefits, to the disadvantage of the rest of the economy.