>And she notes: "Now, the IMF just gave Russia $22 billion. . . .
>Everyone's ecstatic . . . the government is patting itself on the back,
>and now life can go on as it was pre-crisis."
And the kleptocrats' foreign bank accounts will probably swell by at least $11 billion.
Stephen Shenfield of Brown U's Watson Center has a very convincing paper listing 8 reasons why Russia is bound to get worse. When I interviewed him last week, he said he'd added a 9th - the government is planning to boost the taxes on people's private plots. Home-grown potatoes and turnips have helped keep people from starving in Russia. Taxing those plots will be quite literally taking the food from their mouths. But, hey, the Moscow stock market is up something like 25% over the last two days, so who cares!?!?!?
Doug