Anatole Kaletsky

Vladimir Putin could restore Russia’s great power status and maybe go down in history as the country’s most visionary leader since Peter the Great. He could win respect from Beijing and Washington for averting a second global financial crisis and he could prove that Russia understands market economics better than the EU. His miraculous opportunity to do all this started with the Mafia-style “offer you can’t refuse”  presented by the EU to Cyprus on Sunday. It will end on Tuesday morning, if Cyprus banks then re-open under the conditions imposed by the European Troika, as currently planned.

One of the mysteries of the Cyprus crisis has been the lack of response from Russia, despite the obvious strategic opportunities, not just to protect its offshore deposits, but also to exploit the island’s strategic location and its military and energy potential. A possible explanation is that Europe’s indecision also paralyzed Russia -  until last night.

As long as Europe’s policy on Cyprus kept shifting, it was impossible for Russia to intervene, since any help it offered could be rejected or outbid by the EU. As a chess player, Putin probably understood that his best strategy was to wait for Cyprus to get weaker and more desperate, while the EU, and especially Germany, became more impatient and obstinate. The moment to make his move would be when Europe presented an ultimatum too painful or humiliating for Cyprus to accept. That moment arrived last night.

With the EU’s final offer declared, Putin can now make his bid for Cyprus without fearing an auction with richer EU countries who could easily outbid Russia. But will Putin make such a bid? This depends on his answers to three questions: Could Russia afford to offer enough help to save the Cypriot banking system? Would saving Cyprus be useful to Russia? And would it promote Putin’s own interests?

As always in Russian history, we must start with the leader’s personal interests. If Putin could block the Cyprus deposit levy, he would protect assets still stranded there by his oligarch associates, as well as boosting his popularity among the middle-class Russians likely to be the levy’s main victims. But much more important for Putin would be the personal prestige of helping to avert a global financial crisis and outwitting EU leaders to secure Cyprus as a geopolitical prize and a grateful client state within the EU.

The Age of Austerity is over. This is not a prediction, but a simple statement of fact. No serious policymaker anywhere in the world is trying to reduce deficits or debt any longer, and all major central banks are happy to finance more government borrowing with printed money. After Japan’s election of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the undeclared budgetary ceasefire in Washington that followed President Obama’s victory last year, there were just two significant hold-outs against this trend: Britain and the euro-zone. Now, the fiscal “Austerians” and “sado-monetarists” in both these economies have surrendered, albeit for very different reasons.

Much attention has been focused this week on the chaos in Cyprus. Coming after the Italian election and subsequent easing of Italy’s fiscal conditions, the overriding necessity to keep Cyprus within the euro — and its military bases and gas supplies outside Russian control — will almost surely mean another retreat by Germany and the European Central Bank from their excessive austerity demands. But an even more remarkable shift has occurred in Britain. The Cameron government, which embraced fiscal austerity as its main raison d’etre, was suddenly converted to the joys of debt and borrowing in this week’s budget.

Of course, the rhetoric of British Chancellor George Osborne’s budget speech gave no hint of his Damascene conversion. On the contrary, it ridiculed “people who seem to think that the way to borrow less is to borrow more.” But Osborne’s trademark sneers could not disguise the meaning of the policies and numbers he presented.

A feeling of vertigo may seem natural as Wall Street approaches a record and stock markets around the world climb to their highest levels since 2007. With the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index  now only 0.5 percent away from its 2007 high of 1565 and with the Dow Jones industrial average scaling new peaks almost daily, what will investors expect to see when they reach the mountaintop? The mountaineering analogy suggests, at best, a long descent and, at worst, a precipitous drop. But how literally should we take such metaphors?

Bearish analysts often claim that stock market peaks have always been followed by sharp falls, citing as evidence the record high of October 2007, which was quickly followed by a 57 percent collapse in 2008-09. They add that the previous peak, in March 2000, was followed by a 37 percent plunge and that last major high before that, in August 1987, preceded the biggest-ever market crash, in October 1987. These precedents, along with the even more vertiginous peaks of 1989 in Japan and 1929 on Wall Street, certainly sound scary, but they are meaningless.

It may be true that all major market peaks have been followed by big declines, but the reason is semantics, not finance or economics. A peak is, by definition, a high point followed by a decline. A new market high that is not followed by a fall in prices is simply not called a peak. A record of this kind, far from preceding a steep decline, tends to act as a staging post for higher prices. Looking back through history, it turns out that this benign type of record, paving the way for higher prices, is actually the norm.

Ronald Reagan had a catchphrase when faced with a crisis, especially a synthetic “crisis” of the kind Washington loves to concoct. He would call in the officials and media advisers rushing manically around the West Wing and calmly tell them: “Don’t just do something – stand there.”  In this respect, as in several others, “No Drama Obama” seems to resemble the man he once admiringly described, despite their ideological animosity, as the last great “transformational” U.S. president.

With Wall Street hitting new records as Washington supposedly plunges into its latest fiscal crisis with the budget sequestration that began this week, Obama could do well to emulate Reagan’s laid-back style. In addition to doing nothing about the latest manufactured fiscal crisis, he could explain why nothing is the right thing to do.

To be more specific, Obama could negotiate a truce in the budget war. Instead of insisting that Republicans must “pay” for Democratic spending cuts by agreeing to higher taxes, the president could offer a much more attractive deal to both sides. If Republicans eased the sequester and demanded no new spending cuts, the Democrats could promise not to raise any taxes. Such a ceasefire would  be seen by both parties as an honorable draw. Republicans would have fulfilled their pledge to stop higher taxes; while Democrats would have thwarted efforts to gut government and the welfare state.