If you financially cut off a country that produces something you need to survive, be ready to absorb the shocks – or suffer the consequences
Here’s a chicken-or-egg question that should interest Russia observers. What’s really the prime mover in the economy: the physical side or the finance side?
The common view is the finance side, of course. Money moves first and stuff gets built. When things go south, it’s the same principle: finance breaks first and businesses shut down afterward.
That means that money moves matter, which is quite intuitive and aligns with our perception. Things are inert until set into motion by money – we call it investment or capital allocation. It takes capital to build a factory; a produced widget sits on the factory shelf until somebody moves money to buy it.
That seems so obvious as to barely warrant closer inspection. But this model turns out to be quite conditional. The widget is moved by money, but what if there is no widget? Money cannot immediately conjure inventory that does not exist. The model works until it hits conditions of physical scarcity.
Let’s keep this simplistic model in mind and zoom out.
Until recently, the world felt abundant. Money moved first, and matter followed without much friction: Russian gas flowed to Europe by pipeline, fueling industry; consumer goods streamed from Asia, cheap and plentiful. In this environment, the West’s control of the financial infrastructure seemed decisive, while the physical side barely needed to assert itself.
Meanwhile, the financial side grew disproportionately compared with physical output capacity and the two began sharply diverging. For example, over about the last 30 years until recently, US electricity demand – a good proxy for the real economy – barely moved. What happened on Wall Street during that time was a nearly uninterrupted bonanza. That’s one place where the lights were burning bright, so to speak. The apparent lesson was that physical limits mattered little, and for decades, many implicitly assumed just that.
The model whereby finance sits upstream and the real economy follows downstream became deeply internalized over decades. In that world, the logic seemed simple and reliable: money moves first, physical production responds, and capital allocation shapes outcomes.
A striking demonstration of that mindset in practice came with the 2022 sanctions on Russia. The sanctions were designed within an entirely finance-centric paradigm. By that we mean that the strategy implicitly assumed that excluding Russia from the dollar system would transmit systemic stress inside Russia faster and more forcefully than dependence on Russian energy would transmit scarcity elsewhere.
But the assumption implicitly baked into the model is that the physical system has enough slack to absorb shocks. By slack, we mean excess capacity – inventory, spare production, or redundant infrastructure – that can buffer disruptions without triggering cascading failures.
When widget capacity is abundant, you can bankrupt or sanction a single producer without ever running into physical scarcity. In fact, the whole matter never leaves the realm of money. The bankrupted producer disappears, but markets reprice and redirect supply efficiently. In our case, Russia would be crippled, while the available slack means the other side of the equation – the physical supply lost from Russia – stays in the benign realm of price and capital allocation.
The entire sanctions bet rested on an assumption of slack. But it turned out the physical energy system didn’t really have much. The vastly underappreciated reality is that we live in an increasingly energy-constrained world. This is visible across the spectrum: LNG infrastructure stretched to capacity, power grids operating with thin reserve margins, new oil supply increasingly coming from complex, capital-intensive plays, and energy systems that are more integrated and less redundant.
Or step back from system logistics and consider the civilizational scale. If energy were abundant in the old, effortless sense, we would not be drilling two miles vertically and then another two miles laterally through impermeable rock, hydraulically fracturing it in dozens of high-pressure stages and propping open microscopic fissures with millions of pounds of sand. Nor would we be liquefying natural gas at cryogenic temperatures to ship it across oceans before regasifying it to keep power systems stable. That’s not the signature of a system in surplus. The archeologists of the future will certainly see it for it was: a flashing red light of constraint.
This whole discussion may sound like a long, elaborate way of saying that replacing Russian energy turned out to be unrealistic, but that misses the broader point: the creeping physical constraints we’ve described – in energy, in logistics, in supply chains – are becoming the system’s ‘missing widget.’ This is pulling system-wide leverage away from finance, where it long reigned nearly unopposed, and back to the physical side.
In his Valdai Speech last October, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a very interesting observation:
“It’s impossible to imagine that a drop in Russian oil production will maintain normal conditions in the global energy sector and the global economy.”
That was his way of explaining the very point we made above, namely that in a resource-constrained world, the finance-first model breaks down because a system with little slack transmits physical shocks brutally.
I wrote at the time that this represents a fundamental shift from monetary leverage to physical leverage. A Western official could easily have said on the eve of the Ukraine war: “It’s impossible to imagine that a country that loses access to dollars and Western capital markets will maintain normal economic conditions.” That was exactly the assumption made.
Bear in mind that a low level of slack in the system does not necessarily translate into higher prices, which can be deceptive for those trained to read only price signals. The real constraints can be hidden behind seemingly ordinary market signals or dispersed throughout the financial system in the form of debt, subsidies, taxes, etc. Price can even obscure rather than clarify the real state of the system. Is the normalization of gas prices in Europe a product of demand destruction or of solving supply constraints?
So to come back to our question: which is the prime mover, money or matter?
In a world of abundant energy, ample inventories, and redundant supply lines, finance could sit upstream. Capital allocation determined what got built, who survived, and how quickly systems expanded. In that world, excluding a country from the financial plumbing could indeed be decisive.
But we have in recent years quietly slipped into a very different world. Its contours are familiar – in many ways indistinguishable from the old world – yet it is far more fragile and stretched closer to its limits than most realize. We glimpse this shift not through the lens of money but obliquely, sometimes only in fragments.
We see it in the fragile and increasingly contested supply lines; in the intensified global scramble for physical commodities rather than merely paper claims on those commodities; and in Europe’s inability, four years later, to emerge from its energy crisis, or even to properly diagnose it; and in Russia’s remarkable resilience in the face of what should have been a financial death blow.
Everywhere we look, the physical is reasserting itself in ways that feel momentous. Finance will not vanish, but it must now contend with limits that will not yield so readily.
