I think that technically, it will use much less electricity to heat just you bed with a blanket vs. the entire room or house with an electric heater such as the baseboard heaters along the windows. So this solution should actually go a long way towards reducing electricity consumption.
That is what Putin wants you (and especially his populace) to believe. If something is not freely transacted and (say a stock or whatever) has circuit breakers that trigger every 1/100th of a percent up or down would you have much faith in it? We tried price controls in the 70's to fight inflation. Did chit. Volcker raised rates making the cost to borrow exorbitant. Then productivity improved with jobs lost, people working harder ... causing prices to come back down to normal. The marketplace started to work again and Fed stepped away. Until we got Uncle Greenie and irrational exuberance, that he caused. Then QE I, II, III, IV and Operation Twist ad nauseam. Anyway governments can only rig rates so much. The marketplace (which right now is the black market where you get a lot less for your Rubles btw) determine the real costs of goods or money. Russia is rigging the currency rate of exchange. It won't last, just like Putin himself. Means nothing how much RUB/USD is. Nothing.
The only thing we are discussing right now is the exchange rate of the Ruble. Since their of us are actively trying to make a transaction, I don't think we can comment directly, but given the chart I show, there must be a market for it. I don't disagree with any of your assessment, but the market clearly values the Ruble higher since it may very well be backed by oil, gas, or even gold. This is something that neither of us have direction knowledge of unfortunately.
Well maybe you. The tea leaves, which includes what the Russia government puts out itself, sez otherwise. As for the market, that is Russia and a few other commie trading partners. If you want to call that a market, so is the successors to Silk Road.
Well that's kinda what we would do if we just wanted to replace old issues with new issues. But we wouldn't issue the new treasuries for the purpose of buying back the old ones. What we would "functionally" do is buy back all the Treasuries we wanted to buy using money all ready printed, spent into the economy for goods and services and then returned to the Government when we issued the Treasuries in the first place. If we were to but back all the Treasuries, which we won't do, the total money in the private sector economy wouldn't change but it would all be in the form of bank reserves and none of it in the form of Treasuries. Selling Treasuries in the first place returns to the Government side of the ledger new money printed to cover deficit spending into the private sector. The fed, at any time, has the option of just reversing that swap of treasuries for bank reserves to the extent it sees fit. That's what the fed routinely does to control the ration of private sector outside money in the form of bank reserves to that in the form of Treasuries. What's instructive is to contrast the net result of printing, deficit spending and Treasury auctioning (in that order) with Treasury auctioning and spending borrowed money (which we don't do). We print all the money we need to cover our deficits, we don't borrow. We do issue Treasuries in principal amounts equaling our deficits, but it is for purposes other than borrowing.
All The Fed does is make sure debits line up with credits. They put their crack staff of PHD's to work on it. They can handle that 1 + 1 stuff. Forecasting, not so much. The fact that they magically make credits and debits out of thin air bothers you not a bit. The issuance of Treasuries are obligations of the federal government to pay the holder of same, principal back and interest. IOW debt. No ifs and or buts. And the U.S. Government is us. So we, the American people, owe $20+ trillion to ourselves and Governments and their people all around the world. No getting around. Now if you want to say we are good for it, glad to hear it. But it is owed. To be paid at some point unless it is rolled over into infinity. Inflating away ain't happening either, most every other country is wise to that and will follow moves we make. Period.
It's been done several times over. I don't know how many MMT economists there are in just the U.S. alone, I suppose it is a thousand or more. This is the branch of economics dealing with money theory and Treasury/fed/banking transactions. The best book in my opinion is "Understanding Modern Money", L. Randall Wray - there is a new addition out, I only have the older one. There is also Stephanie Kelton's new book "The Deficit Myth", a very easy read but not scholarly like Wray's. Kelton was a U.S. Senate Economist, now she's at a University I Think. There are several more, and a new undergraduate economics text that is the first one to get this money stuff correct. The money and banking chapters in the classic economics texts have a lot of mistakes that have only been widely exposed since about the early 1990s. I got interested in money theory after reading Wray's book ~15 years ago. Wray is a Minsky protege. It was after reading Wray that I realized a lot of what I had been taught is wrong. I became a serious student of money theory and fed monetary policy. One of my best friends is a well known environmental economist, and he has served as my tutor in the area of macroeconomics. He was trained before the "great enlightening", as were nearly all the economists who are older than ~50 today.
I am willing to bet that before there are large scale power blackouts in Germany and more than 10% houses are without heat, Florida will be entirely deserted because nobody wants to undergo flood, hurricane, and rising sea level destruction anymore. De Santis will wish he put himself on the flight to Martha's Vineyard. Europe will be fine, people in Europe and Russia and many parts of the world learned to learn with struggle, hardship, and challenges, unlike many among the North American younger generations....