{"id":123202,"date":"2022-03-03T18:14:06","date_gmt":"2022-03-04T01:14:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=123202"},"modified":"2022-03-03T18:14:06","modified_gmt":"2022-03-04T01:14:06","slug":"the-looting-of-russia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2022\/03\/03\/the-looting-of-russia\/","title":{"rendered":"The Looting of Russia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark Weisbrot Center for Economic and Policy Research<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n

Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel<\/em>, September 8, 1999<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Knight-Ridder\/Tribune Media Services, September 1, 1999
Charleston Post and Courier<\/em>, September 3, 1999<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What were they thinking? When executives at the Bank of New York saw billions of dollars floating in from the home computer of a Russian businessman with ties to organized crime there, did they
really believe that these were just ordinary profits?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The biggest money-laundering scandal in history has prompted calls for a fresh look at the role of American and IMF funds in Russia. To say this is long overdue would be an understatement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The corruption is certainly mind-numbing in scale and scope, with some of the West\u2019s favorite reformers\u201d\u2013 including Konstantin Kagalovsky, the former Russian representative at the IMF\u2013 at the center of the investigation. But the tribute that the Russian mafia skims off the top is just one part of the looting of Russia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other part has been scripted by Washington and its most powerful financial institution: the International Monetary Fund. It is a different form of pillage, to be sure. The robber barons who have taken over the Russian economy since the fall of the Soviet Union have adopted the practice of the Medici family of fifteenth century Florence: money to get power, power to protect the money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Washington\u2019s money mandarins, on the other hand, descended upon Russia with enormous wealth and power already in their possession. They have used both to colonize Russia, turning a once developed economy into a Third World country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The results have been devastating. Over the last eight years, the economy has shrunk by more than half. Russian men can now expect to die in their fifties. The chief economist of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, has noted that the number of Russians living in poverty climbed from two million to sixty million in just a few years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stiglitz, who is one of America\u2019s most accomplished and respected economists, has recently argued that these results are not just due to sound policies being poorly implemented.\u201d Rather, they are based on a misunderstanding of the very foundations of a market economy, as well as an excessive reliance on textbook models of economics.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The experience of the last year shows just how 180-degree wrong the foreign experts can be. August 17th marked the first anniversary of the collapse of the ruble, which fell from its fixed rate of about 6 to the dollar one year ago to 25 today. The IMF poured in billions of dollars to prop up the overvalued currency, and Washington predicted disaster for the Russians if they did not maintain the fixed exchange rate. There would be hyperinflation, they said, and sources of foreign capital would dry up. The economy would fall apart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A year later, it is clear that the sky did not fall with the ruble. The threatened hyperinflation did not occur\u2013 inflation is running at about 45% for the year. The currency\u2019s collapse made imports much more expensive, and gave Russian industry a chance to get back on its feet. Industrial production in July was up 12.8% over last year, and Russia\u2019s trade surplus has risen more than tenfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even Russia\u2019s default on $40 billion of foreign debt, almost unthinkable until it happened, has not really hurt the economy. True, foreign capital inflows have fallen off sharply over the last year. But since these funds did little more than inflate a speculative bubble in the financial sector\u2013encouraged by the IMF\u2019s high interest rate, fixed exchange rate policy\u2013 the productive sectors were not greatly affected when the bubble burst.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It has been one debacle after another since the IMF introduced its shock therapy\u201d program in 1992. Like a battered spouse who sees no alternative but to return to her abuser, Russia comes back to the IMF for more credits. But the hundreds of billions that have fled the country in the 1990\u2019s have cancelled out this aid,\u201d as well as the meager foreign direct investment, many times over. At the same time Russia has accumulated more than $150 billion in foreign debt, with the burden of debt service now reaching a crushing 29% of export earnings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At some point any rational, non-corrupt political leader in Russia has to question whether the country\u2019s friendly relations with Washington are worth the price of continued impoverishment. That time may be approaching, as Russia elects first a Parliament and then a President over the next 10 months. There will be calls from across the political spectrum to break, or at least loosen, the chains that bind Russia to its Western tormentors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The American press will mostly dismiss these demands as nationalist finger-pointing, and attribute Russia\u2019s demise to its failure to hew more closely to the IMF\u2019s prescriptions. And Washington will pour in money, as it did in the 1996 elections, to support its friends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the Russians might well be better off cutting this toxic umbilical cord, which could give them at least a fighting chance against the powerful domestic criminal class that our own government\u2013 and private sector\u2013 has helped to create.<\/p>\n\n\n\n