Translation. Region: Russian Federal
Source: Rosneft – Rosneft – An important disclaimer is at the bottom of this article.
Interest payments on US government debt are diverting significant budget resources, said Rosneft Chief Executive Officer Igor Sechin during his speech at the Energy Panel at the XXVIII St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
He recalled that the predicament in which developed countries find themselves due to the growth of public debt is already reflected in the assessment of their creditworthiness. Thus, in May, Moody’s became the last of the three leading international rating agencies to strip the United States of its highest credit rating.
“With the growing deficit, interest payments are diverting significant budget resources from the social and defense spheres. Last year, net interest payments on the national debt reached a trillion dollars, which amounted to 14% of all state budget expenditures, exceeded defense expenditures, and is already approaching the amount of healthcare expenditures,” Sechin said.
The head of Rosneft also turned to history and gave an example of how great powers decline due to excessively high levels of public debt. “The fate of Habsburg Spain in the seventeenth century and monarchical France in the eighteenth, the Ottoman and British empires in the last century fully confirm this theory,” he added.
“At the end of the 18th century, French rulers experienced for themselves that the fiscal guillotine could very quickly end up as a real guillotine,” Igor Sechin noted. By that time, France had accumulated such a volume of debt that more than half of all government spending was spent on servicing it, which led to an increase in taxes. According to the head of Rosneft, this was one of the main reasons for the Great French Revolution, which, in essence, ensured the transition from a monarchy to a bourgeois parliamentary republic.
Department of Information and Advertising of PJSC NK Rosneft June 21, 2025
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