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IPFS News Link • Russia

Russia's Weakness Is Its Economic Policy

• Paul Craig Roberts and Michael Hudson

It would have avoided most of the capital flight to the West by relying on self-finance.
 
Washington, however, took advantage of a naive, gullible and demoralized Russian government which looked to Washington for guidance in the post-Soviet era.  Russians thought that the rivalry between the two countries had ended with the Soviet collapse and trusted American advice to modernize the  Russian economy with best-practice Western ideas. Instead, Washington abused this trust to saddle Russia with an economic policy designed to carve up Russian economic assets and transfer ownership into foreign hands.  By tricking Russia into accepting foreign capital and exposing the ruble to currency speculation, Washington made sure that the US could destabalize Russia with capital outflows and assaults on the ruble's exchange value.  Only a government unfamiliar with the neoconservative aim of US world hegemony would have exposed its economic system to such foreign manipulation. 


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