Opinion
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4A — Monday, September 9, 2019

Zack Blumberg
Emily Considine
Emma Chang
Joel Danilewitz
Emily Huhman

Krystal Hur
Ethan Kessler
Magdalena Mihaylova
Max Mittleman
Timothy Spurlin

Miles Stephenson
Finn Storer
Nicholas Tomaino
Joel Weiner
Erin White 

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Managing Editor

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“

It was the best of times, it 
was the worst of times,” 
began Charles Dickens in 
his 1859 novel “A Tale of Two 
Cities.” Today, more than 150 years 
after Dickens’ death, those words 
remain relevant: At present, they 
describe the predicament facing 
Russian President Vladimir Putin. 
Internationally, Putin’s reign has 
been a time of great success for 
Russia. Since first coming to power 
in 2000, he has emerged as the 
face of the modern Russian state, 
increased his nation’s power on the 
global stage and made significant 
strides towards Russia’s long-term 
goal of destabilizing Western, liberal 
democracies. However, while Putin 
continues to project strength abroad, 
he faces a spate of domestic concerns, 
with economic struggles and recent 
protests over electoral freedom 
causing his approval rating to drop as 
Russians begin to worry about their 
future. 
It is undeniable that through 
the lens of global geopolitics, Putin’s 
tenure as Russian president has been 
a time of great accomplishment for 
his nation. Today, Putin’s name and 
image are synonymous with the 
Russian state, a sign of his global 
political presence. He is consistently 
ranked alongside American and 
Chinese leaders as one of the world’s 
most powerful heads of state, despite 
governing a substantially smaller and 
less economically powerful nation 
than his Chinese and American 
counterparts. The sentiment that 
Putin is a strong leader is reflected in 
his global perception: As of 2018, 52 
percent of Americans believed Russia 
played a bigger role in the world than 
it had 10 years prior, while only 15 
percent thought it played a smaller 
role. 
However, Putin’s projections of 
strength are just the tip of the iceberg: 
On the world stage, he’s made tangible 
strides towards achieving Russia’s 
political goals. Russia’s primary goal 
is bigger than Putin: to destabilize 
Western nations it believes to be part 
of the liberal order. This aim extends 
back to the founding of the modern 
Russian state. After the Soviet Union 
fell, many former Soviet Republics 
and Soviet Union protectorates, 
which 
the 
Russians 
saw 
as 
culturally Russian, joined Western 
organizations such as the North 
Atlantic Treaty Organization and 
the European Union, manifestations 
of the U.S.-backed liberal order. As 
the Russian president, weakening 
the liberal West is naturally a goal 
Putin has worked to further. His 

most-publicized triumph came in the 
2016 U.S. presidential election, when 
Russia’s government-backed online 
trolling group, the Internet Research 
Agency, helped sow political discord 
and promote President Donald 
Trump’s candidacy, which ultimately 
aided his victory. However, Putin’s 
accomplishments extend far beyond 
causing chaos in the 2016 presidential 
election: there are ties between 
Russia and the United Kingdom’s 
“Vote Leave” campaign from the 
2016 Brexit referendum, and many of 
Europe’s newly-empowered far-right 
parties, which share Putin’s disdain 
for liberalism, have ties to Russia. 
While 
Russia’s 
government-
sponsored electoral meddling has 
been highly effective, perhaps its 
most significant contribution is 
the blueprint it left behind. Across 
the globe, online political trolling 
has become a common electoral 
tactic. Though the aforementioned 
European far-right does maintain 
ties to Russia, many parties can 
now rely on a steady stream of 
inflammatory misinformation from 
far-right websites in their respective 
countries, a move inspired by the 
IRA’s tactics. Meanwhile, in other 
countries such as the Philippines, 
spreading 
misinformation 
has 
blossomed into a major component 
of 
political 
campaigning, 
with 
independent 
companies 
offering 
their online trolling services to 
candidates.
In 
addition 
to 
promoting 
democratic destabilization in the 
West, Putin has also worked to 
effectively expand Russia’s influence 
in Africa. Documents leaked earlier 
this year showed the Russian 
government’s plans to build ties with 
various African nations, including 
the Central African Republic, Libya 
and Madagascar, with the aim of 
introducing Russia-friendly leaders, 
promoting Russian political values, 
accessing natural resource deposits 
and securing lucrative military 
contracts. By competing with foreign 
nations (namely China and the 
United States) for influence in Africa, 
Putin aims to strengthen Russia’s 
influence abroad to a degree which 
has not been seen since the fall of the 
Soviet Union. With regard to Russian 
values, the documents revealed 
the Russian government’s interest 
in creating a sense of Pan-African 
nationalism among the countries it 
worked with in Africa, something 
which bears many similarities to the 
idea of the “Russky Mir” (Russian 
World), the ideology Russia uses to 
justify encroaching on the rights of 

former Soviet states like Belarus 
and Ukraine. Although Russia 
cannot match the massive financial 
investments the United States and 
China have made in Africa, they still 
demonstrate Putin’s vision of Russia 
as a global power capable of molding 
the world in its vision. 
However, 
despite 
Putin’s 
success in expanding Russian 
influence abroad, he faces several 
problems in his home country 
that may be of serious concern. 
Putin’s biggest obstacle is Russia’s 
struggling economy and its impact 
on everyday citizens — over the 
past five years, the average real 
income in Russia has dropped by 
over 10 percent, and Russians are 
understandably frustrated. Russia’s 
economic struggles, including the 
decreasing real income, can be 
traced back to two primary causes, 
both of which Putin bears some 
responsibility for. Most directly, at 
least some of Russia’s contemporary 
problems are tied to sanctions placed 
on Russia for annexation of Crimea, 
a move Putin had direct control over 
(ironically, the original invasion 
boosted Putin’s popularity). More 
importantly, Russia’s key economic 
problem in the past decade has 
been falling oil revenues. Though 
Putin 
cannot 
singlehandedly 
control the global prices of oil, 
many of Russia’s oil problems 
are linked to the government’s 
inability to diversify the Russian 
economy beyond natural resource 
production, something which stems 
from Putin’s disinterest in tackling 
economic corruption (though that 
is unsurprising, considering Putin is 
a personal beneficiary of the current 
system). 
While Putin’s most pressing 
domestic concern is the economy, 
Russian citizens have also grown 
frustrated with some of Putin’s 
repressive political tactics and are 
coming out in protest. Earlier this 
year, investigative journalist Ivan 
Golunov was held in jail on fabricated 
drug charges after he investigated 
corruption in the Russian funeral 
industry. However, after protests 
across the nation, the government 
ultimately admitted defeat and 
released Golunov. In recent weeks, 
a spate of protests have been held in 
Moscow after Putin’s government 
disqualified several rival candidates 
running for city council positions. 

ZACK BLUMBERG | COLUMN

Putin’s international success and domestic struggle

C 

ollege students ought 
to be interested in the 
recent inversion of the 
yield curve, as its ramifications 
could 
potentially 
pose 
a 
significant threat to our post-
graduation plans.
For those who don’t know 
what the yield curve is, it is 
a graph that plots different 
bonds by their contract length 
and their respective yields, or 
how much one gets back for 
investment. Typically, 10-year 
bonds 
have 
higher 
yields 
because that means people are 
lending out their money for a 
longer period of time and thus 
should expect a greater return 
on their investment. However, 
for the first time since 2006, the 
yield curve recently “inverted,” 
meaning that short term yields 
increased above long term ones.
Why is this such a big deal? 
Bonds are generally a much 
better measure of the economy’s 
health 
than 
other 
markers, 
such as stocks, for a couple 
reasons. First and foremost, the 
variability of the stock market 
is pretty much unpredictable. 
When it is up or down, people 
will offer their thoughts on what 
has influenced it as a whole, but 
typically the day-to-day just 
sometimes changes. Bonds are 
like stocks but are generally 
considered safer due to their 
complexity 
and 
guaranteed 
returns. As business journalist 
Heidi 
Moore 
eloquently 
explained in a tweet thread: 
“The stock market is a way that 
people tell short stories about 
a company … Bonds also tell a 
story about a company or a 
government. But it’s a BETTER 
story, a novel rather than a short 
story.”
The inverted yield curve is a 
better indicator of the economy’s 
health than any given down turn 
in the stock market. As short-
term bonds have increasingly 
higher yields than long-term 
ones, investors are essentially 

saying that the short run is 
looking riskier than the long 
run, and therefore yields should 
be higher in order to compensate 
for the higher risk (i.e., there is 
most likely a recession landing 
in about two years’ time).
That may seem like a whole 
lot of economic jargon, but 
in reality, the track record 
for inverted yield curves and 
recessions in the U.S. and United 
Kingdom is rather uncanny. All 
of the recessions in post-war 
America have been preceded 
by an inversion in the yield 
curve about two years prior. 
That is cause enough for serious 
concern.
Truthfully, it is incredibly 
difficult to discern the exact 
cause of this phenomenon. All 
we can do is infer plausible 
causes and make judgments on 
them on a case-by-case basis. 
What we do know is that the 
temporary 
inversion 
in 
the 
yield curve means that there 
is some sort of short-term 
uncertainty 
in 
the 
market. 
Most likely, it is a combination 
of factors all impacting the 
market. Global growth is down: 
Germany is nearing a recession 
with a shrinking economy and 
Argentina’s stock market lost 
about half its value in a few 
days. Pair this with the ongoing 
trade 
tensions 
between 
the 
U.S. and China and a looming 
disaster brewing in the United 
Kingdom. due to the possibility 
of a “No-Deal” Brexit, and it all 
points to a murky short-term 
future for the global market.
It is also somewhat possible 
that there is a self-fulfilling 
aspect of this warning. After all, 
the inverted yield curve does 
not cause a recession; it merely 
acts as a historic signifier of one. 
Warnings of a looming downturn 
could influence stakeholders to 
respond accordingly by saving 
more and spending less, which 
in turn slows the economy and 
thus we have the very thing we 

feared would happen anyway. 
It should be noted that while 
this inversion has occurred 
before every recession, the 
sample size for this indicator 
is 
still 
rather 
small. 
The 
outcome is not guaranteed, 
but it is reasonably probable — 
we ought to take the warning 
seriously all the same. 
President 
Donald 
Trump 
has 
tried 
diverting 
much 
of the attention away from 
the warning signs, tweeting 
recently that “the Democrats 
are trying to ‘will’ the economy 
to be bad for purposes of the 
2020 elections” while also 
attacking the Federal Reserve 
for not keeping interest rates 
lower. 
Unfortunately, 
there 
is no evidence that the Fed’s 
interest rates have much to do 
with this phenomenon, and it is 
unlikely the Democratic party 
possesses the will to impact 
global markets in such a way.
Regardless of possible causes, 
everyone attending a university 
should be paying close attention 
over the next year or so. Great 
resources include keeping up 
with news sources such as The 
Economist, The Wall Street 
Journal or the Financial Times 
that all cover the economy in 
detail (and all have some sort 
of student discount available). 
Another tool to stay educated 
is social media. Find and follow 
a few economists to stay up to 
date.
If the inversion of the yield 
curve is correct again that 
means a recession is just two 
short years away. Which, by 
my math, means it will hit as 
most of us currently attending 
the University of Michigan are 
graduating. Securing a job can 
be hard enough after getting 
your diploma. Let’s hope we 
don’t have to do that in the 
midst of a new recession too.

Observe the inverted curve

Zack Blumberg can be reached at 

zblumber@umich.edu.

ALANNA BERGER | COLUMN

On mental health and mass shootings

Timothy Spurlin can be reached at 

timrspur@umich.edu.

TIMOTHY SPURLIN | COLUMN

“

Mental illness and hate pulls 
the trigger, not the gun,” said 
President Donald Trump at 
a White House address following 
the back-to-back shootings in El 
Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio 
in early August. Trump’s words 
echo a greater sentiment put forth 
by a multitude of politicians and 
gun rights advocates in the days 
following mass shootings. 
In the wake of the mass 
shootings that have plagued the 
United States for the better part 
of two decades, elected officials 
and various public figures have 
often steered the debate away from 
gun control toward mental illness 
issues within the country. Perhaps, 
at first, this seems to make sense. 
To many Americans, the thought 
of entering a public space with 
high powered weapons for the 
sole purpose of killing innocent 
strangers 
is 
incomprehensible. 
A sensible conclusion seems to 
be that no individual of a sound 
mind would do such a thing, and 
therefore such a perpetrator must 
have some sort of mental illness. 
However, 
the 
majority 
of 
research demonstrates that the 
propensity to make a connection 
between mass gun violence and 
mental illness is misguided. Though 
some high-profile mass shooters, 
such as those who committed the 
massacres at Virginia Tech, in 
Tucson, Ariz. and in Newtown, 
Conn., had a history of mental 
illness, evidence demonstrates this 
relationship is not causal. 
The first piece of evidence to 
disprove the relationship between 
mental illness and mass gun 
violence is that the United States 
is not unique in terms of rates 
of mental health issues. In fact, 
statistics show rates of mental 
illness remain roughly the same 
throughout 
the 
world. 
When 
compared with peer nations such 
as Canada, Ireland or Germany, 
the United States demonstrates 
similar rates of mental illness. If 
mental illness was truly the main 
cause of these random acts of 
mass violence, then the rates of 
mass shootings in these countries 
should be comparable to those in 
the United States. However, when 
it comes to gun violence, the United 
States stands alone among its peers. 
As of 2017, gun-related deaths 
comprise 73 percent of homicides in 

the United States, compared with 3 
percent in England and Wales as 
of 2017, 38 percent in Canada as of 
2018 and 13 percent in Australia as 
of 2013. In fact, gun homicides in 
the U.S. are at a 25.2 times higher 
rate than gun homicides in other 
comparable 
developed 
nations. 
Additionally, the United States 
ranks as the 28th highest in terms 
of rates of deaths from gun violence 
worldwide, far higher than other 
developed countries. While the 
mental illness epidemic appears 
to be universal, the gun violence 
epidemic 
remains 
uniquely 
American. 

Another counterpoint to the 
notion of mental illness as a 
cause of mass shootings or gun 
violence is the fact that mentally 
ill individuals, in reality, commit 
a small fraction of overall violent 
crimes. Data from the National 
Center 
for 
Health 
Statistics 
shows that less than 5 percent of 
violent crimes are committed by 
those with diagnosable mental 
illnesses. 
Thus, 
those 
with 
mental health issues are overall 
unlikely 
to 
perpetrate 
violent 
crimes, including gun violence 
and mass shootings. Moreover, 
further 
statistics 
demonstrate 
that mentally ill individuals are, 
in fact, much more likely to be the 
victims of violent crimes. More 
than 25 percent of those diagnosed 
with a mental illness will be the 
victim of a violent crime. It seems 
that the existence of a mental 
illness is a far better predictor of 
victimization of violence rather 
than of perpetration. 
At this point, it is clear that a 
mental illness does not make an 
individual more likely to harm 
others in acts of gun violence. 
However, there is another link 
between 
mental 
illness 
and 
gun violence that often remains 

undiscussed. Suicides have long 
accounted for the majority of 
gun-related deaths in the United 
States. Suicide by firearm is also 
an extremely brutal method, 
accounting for less than 6 percent 
of suicide attempts but over half 
of fatalities. Furthermore, ease 
of access to guns contributes to 
suicide risk. People living in states 
with high rates of household gun 
ownership are four times as likely 
to die by gun-related suicide when 
compared to states with lower 
rates of household gun ownership. 
In this sense, there appears to be 
a link between gun violence and 
mental health struggles. However, 
access to firearms proves to be 
a greater risk to the mentally ill 
themselves rather than to the rest 
of society as a whole. 
In the wake of mass shootings 
that continually rattle the United 
States, 
politicians 
repeatedly 
blame the mental health crisis 
for the carnage. This is an issue 
that persists on both sides of 
the ideological spectrum, with 
Trump blaming the mentally ill for 
pulling the trigger and Democratic 
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo 
calling for a “mental health data 
base to prevent the dangerously 
mentally ill from purchasing a 
firearm.” 
Repeatedly 
placing 
the blame for our gun violence 
crisis on the nation’s mentally 
ill, an already vulnerable and 
stigmatized population, is unfair 
and dangerous. The fact of the 
matter is that both mental illness 
and gun violence are massive 
public health epidemics inflicting 
untold damage on the American 
populace. 
Even 
though 
the 
brazen 
capacity for violence demonstrated 
in high profile mass shootings 
seems far outside the bounds of 
sanity to most people, mental 
illness is decidedly not responsible 
for the high rates of gun violence 
in the United States (barring those 
related to suicide). In order to 
properly provide for our nation’s 
mentally ill, we must dispel 
harmful stereotypes that mental 
health issues are responsible for 
one of our worst national scourges 
and begin to look elsewhere to 
combat our gun violence epidemic. 

Alanna Berger can be reached at 

balanna@umich.edu.

When it comes to 
gun violence, the 
United States stands 
alone among its 
peers

KAAVYA RAMACHANDHRAN | CONTACT CARTOONIST AT KAAVYAR@UMICH.EDU

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