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***BREAKING NEWS** The new Deutsche Mark banknotes are here**Picture will follow tomorrow***
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[quote:Anonymous Coward 974458:MV8xMDYyNjU1XzE3NTIwMTAyXzM4MjE2NkNF] [quote:Anonymous Coward 1001307] Ah... everything is always different in Russia :D Unless people start thinking that doing business and getting rich honestly is a good thing, I´m afraid it´s going to be difficult to see improvements. Hanging people doesn´t do it. Bureaucracy is just a hindrance and it also gives people the wrong incentives. In such a context, corruption is very likely to prosper. If that happens, however oil and gas is sold, people will benefit only marginally. I think the West is not a good example at all. Look at all that we´ve done wrong. China has learned what to take and what to avoid. Deng recognized that change was needed and he said that getting rich is glorious. They kept the facade of communism, but they really are capitalists. Much more than here in the West. Btw, a video on a guy that went to Russia to do business and was successful... actually TOO successful. :) Quite interesting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84MsRuC-1l8&playnext_from=TL&videos=xlgN987RcCw You can't imagine how much we all HATE HIM and people like him! He would be one of those hanged. As for getting rich honestly, even I am not sure.. Most people in Russia would say it's abolutely unthinkable to justify getting rich, because gettiung rich can't be honest. Haha... but why do you HATE HIM? :D Because what he says is not true? Or because it is true? Whether getting rich honestly is possible or not depends mostly on the system. The objective should be to create a system that rewards those who do something that helps society. [/quote] It's way too complicated.. What he says is 100% true, but I and the people hate HIM and only him not for saying, but for doing. It's a nice example to our duscussions on the system and getting rich honestly or dishonestly. In this short movie, he admits HIMSELF that he got rich by bying shares of Russian state-own companies at 1%-10% of what he expected them to cost. Well, I respect the fact that a business is done by buying low and selling high, and this can be justified in many cases - in the real economy, teh one who buys low and sells high smooths imbalances in most cases. Even in the financial sector one can imagine an honest and fair strategy like investing in some risky high-tech enterprise that suddenly becomes a great success. But was this the case with the Hermitage foundation? What was the source of his revenues? The source of the revenues was the desperate situation in Russia after the collapse of the USSR. After there was a political decision to swith to a market economy overnight, the state-run economy suddenly turned out unmanageble, and a decision was taken to rush selling off all the assets of the whole country that were the state property at that time. The process of privatization was also managed poorly, nobody knew how that would work out, but at the time there were no money in the country, the government was desperate to earn at least some money, an incredibly high amount of property was put on the market at a time, and everything was in a terrible mess, the assets were sold off at impossibly low prices. Was that legal? Yes, it was, but you should keep in mind that the laws were written by the same guys who did the political decision to do it that way. Was it fair? Obviously not. Some people got rich, they became billionairs in the matter of months, but the nation suffered. It was the public property that suddenly turned somebody's private property, without an adequate compensation. Previously, the Soviet governemnt had managed all those assets and used them for the good of the people (at least in the way the Soviet goverment imagined the good of the poeple), and after the privatization those assets have been serving somebody's private goals, without an adequate compensation to the society! The issue is of course complex, because in many cases it was obvious that the government was unable to manage most of that assets properly at that time, and the private owners turned out to be much more efficient. However, this was true only in some individual cases and mostly when the natural resources were overtaken; most of the industry was taken over at less then 1% of the value and immediately sold for scrap with the substantial profits. As for the natural resources, not all of the new ownerd did in fact manage the companies; most of them, including the guy in the video (as he himself admits) sold those assets off in a short while with the huge revenues. It was enough to pay an audit by a western audic agency to raise the market value of a company 10 times; the guy in the video admits that. It was not necessary to manage the company at all in ordert to get high profits; they did nothing for the public good. They were scavengers that torn appart the dead body of the Soviet state, at the cost of the public wellfare of the Russian people. It was how the enormous fortunes were "earned". A brilliant example of a way of becoming rich that the common people will never ever justify. I believe that you have payed more attention toi the second part of his speach where he describes the way his property was taken from him. Yes, it was. Again, it is all very sad and very complex. On the one hand, I don't feel that this money was a fair money and I don't believe he had a right to keep it; most of the people here think the same. Most people supported the extraction of the property from such guys. But the problem is that it hasn't been done openly and publically, it hasn't been done universally, it hasn't been done through laws and courts. It has been done through crime and robbery, secretly, disgustingly, whith breaking all the laws, with convicting and later killing innocent people in prison (Magnitsky). The reason why it was done this way is also quite clear: if it had been declared openly that the results of the privatizations would revised, the governmentg would have got too many influential foes at a time. Oligarchs controlled the large portion of the national assets and inflyenced the politics at that time; the foreign governments wouldn't appreciate that also since the global financial elites had won a huge share of the Soviet heritage and they didn't want to give it up. Very rich and influential foes insode the country supported by the richest and the most powerful states of the world - that would have been the challange faced by Putin's governemnt if he had decided to do it openly at that time. That would have been a suicide. Besides that, he had strong supporters among oligarchs, and he himself got the dividends from all those assets, and he used those assets to win the support of his political allies. Certainly he didn't want to lose all of that, he didn't want to get back to a socialist reality where having a fir hat and a personal car was the best thing one could imagine. That's why he used his secret service tactics to knock away his foes one by one, adopting illega; practices, saying one things and doing other things. And he left naturally some loyal people with their fortunes, and the fortunes extracted from the unloyal people was shared among the loyal ones, the ones that were ready to subordinate to him and execute his orders, often far beyond their legal obligations. So the problem was solved in a tactical way, without a strategic soution - those bad guys did lose their dishonestly earned fortunes indeed, but this money didn't serve the public good but remained in private hands of loyal people. Those people of course do whatever they are told to, so the money actually serve the interests much broader than the private interests of the nominal holders, and for the first time there was a misconception that in this way the money will serve the public good without changing the system, but in fact all this works against the existing laws in a contradiction to the whole governemnt machine, so the government machine gets hopelessly corrupt and loses its meaning while the relations that really matter are neither regulated nor supervised. In the videom the guy talks about the raid against his fund as if some criminals took his property from him, bribing the corrupt government officials. That is incorrect. It was an illegal, but a very common and usual operation initiated and supervised by the state aimed at depriving him of his property. It's not so easy that any random raider can bribe offcials and take over what he wants; it only happens if the people on the very top want it to happen. In fact, Putin has solved many problems that previously seemed to be insolvable by using his tacticts of secret and often illegal operatons, by solving every particular case of the problem seperately by different instruments, by saying one thing and doing the opposite. It seems that it's not a proper way of doing things for a politican, but he was extremely successful with that and he managed to solve hopeless problems like crime (the one independent from the satte :-) ), separatism, permanently deadlocked parlament, dangerous radical opposition, and other problems that blocked Russia's development in the 90'ies. Everybody was amazed, people believed that there will be some further development after the problems are solved, but after solving the problems and getting the full control over the all the politics and economy of Russia, the leaders concentrated on keeping the power and the money and ignored everything else. There's no strategy, and there's even no legislation that would declare the current state of things legal; the official statments and the propaganda is still very far from the actual state of things, the governmrnt is totally corrupt because it doesn't actually matter at alll the country is managed by shadow groups of people with undisclosed rules and relations between them. It is very sad, because this technically can't last forever and the country is meanwhile deteriorating. However, the guys like the one in video are no better than those who sit on the money now, because the money was stolen, and it doesn't matter much how much they steal the money from each other after that. [/quote]
Original Message
I'm working at the Deutsche Bank in Germany. Today we delivered 1 container with new Deutsche Mark notes and new coins. I will present a photo from the new banknotes tomorrow morning. The curencychange will be the night from Saturday to Sunday 5/16/2010. On Friday, 19.00 GMT Angela Merkel the germany chancelor, will speach to the german nation.
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