President Vladimir Putin has surprised the Russian banking community, and global emerging market analysts, by dismissing the Central Bank chief Victor Gerashchenko, and replacing him with a man, who despite a decade of holding senior finance policy posts in Moscow, is totally unknown to have opinions of his own. Sergei Ignatiev, 54, currently deputy finance […]

by John Helmer - Wednesday, March 20th, 2002
No Comments »

By John Helmer The only foreign-language sentence that managed to lodge itself correctly in the brain of Ronald Reagan, before he developed Alzheimer’s Disease but after he became President of the United States, was “doveryai no proveryai”. As he never tired of explaining, that is Russian for “trust but verify.” Reagan and his successors always […]

by John Helmer - Friday, March 15th, 2002
No Comments »

When a tree falls in the forest, everywhere in the world the same thing happens. It makes a loud noise; it drops to the right or left; it crushes the life below unpredictably. But when a Russian bank crashes, it comes down in a way that’s unique – less like a doomed tree, more like […]

by John Helmer - Sunday, March 3rd, 2002
No Comments »

There’s an old saying – not everyone with a knife is a cook. Take the EU trade commissioners, for example, and the European Commission’s Directorate-General III (Industry). For years, these appointees of every European manufacturing interest, large and small, have hectored audiences in Moscow about the desirability of reform in the Russian steel industry. They […]

by John Helmer - Monday, February 25th, 2002
No Comments »

A Moscow investment bank recently concluded that President Vladimir Putin’s popularity has become so solid, “almost no imaginable political development can significantly affect it.” That’s quite a leap of imagination for a banker but, as the assessment is widely held in both domestic and foreign circles, it’s worth taking a closer look at the evidence […]

by John Helmer - Monday, February 25th, 2002
No Comments »

The ancient wit of Aesop was born out of misfortune and is especially sharp on the subject of people getting their just desserts. You see, Aesop was unlucky enough to have been captured in war and sold into slavery as a personal secretary for his owners. In Aesop’s fable about the middle-aged man and his […]

by John Helmer - Friday, February 1st, 2002
No Comments »

One of the old Russian toast wishes everyone more pies and buns, fewer blackeyes and bruises. It seemed the exporters of platinum group metals were following the toast’s advice, until last week’s announcement from Ford Motor Company. The new U.S. accounting rules obliged the auto giant to disclose the value of palladium it acquired last […]

by John Helmer - Saturday, January 26th, 2002
No Comments »

Now that we are all done with cheering and feasting, it is worth remembering the pagan roots of the 12 Days of Christmas and the celebratory season in general. Long before Jesus Christ was born, the ancient Greeks and Romans held festivals in late December to mark the winter solstice. For them, the rebirth of […]

by John Helmer - Friday, January 18th, 2002
No Comments »

If you want to achieve the miracles required for sainthood, one of the great advantages of the Russian Orthodox Church is that it allows you to perform them after you are dead. This not only relieves qualifiers for canonization of a lot of pressure while they are alive. It also gives them the benefit of […]

by John Helmer - Friday, December 21st, 2001
No Comments »

When the epic tale is told of how Russia’s defense industry broke out of the chokehold of gunrunning commission agents and of well-heeled U.S. and European rivals, Malaysia will have a prominent part in the story. That’s because the Malaysian air force was the first Western-equipped air force to break the mold and select Russian-built […]

by John Helmer - Friday, October 12th, 2001
No Comments »