Sechin spoke about the undermining of the Western economy by the growth of public debt

US interest payments on government debt divert significant budgetary resources of Western economies, Rosneft Chief Executive Officer Igor Sechin said during a speech at an energy panel at the XXVIII St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

He recalled that the predicament faced by developed countries due to the growth of public debt is already reflected in the assessment of their creditworthiness. So, in May, Moody's was the last of the three leading international rating agencies to strip the United States of its highest credit rating.

"With a growing deficit, interest payments divert significant budgetary resources from the social and defense sectors. Last year, net interest payments on the national debt reached a trillion dollars, which accounted for 14% of all state budget expenditures, exceeded defense spending and is already approaching the amount of healthcare spending," Sechin said.

The head of Rosneft gave a historical example of how great powers come to decline due to excessively high levels of public debt. "The fate of Habsburg Spain in the 17th century and monarchical France in the 18th, the Ottoman and British Empires in the last century fully confirm this theory," he added.

"At the end of the 18th century, the French rulers felt for themselves that the fiscal guillotine could very quickly end with a real guillotine," Igor Sechin noted. At that time, the head of Rosneft recalled, France had accumulated so much debt that more than half of all government expenditures were spent on servicing them, which led to an increase in taxes. According to Sechin, this was one of the main reasons for the Great French Revolution, which ensured the transition from a monarchy to a bourgeois parliamentary republic.