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The Moscow Times Moscow Guide – Winter 2008

Since the middle of autumn one of the most important topics of discussion, could only be … no, not the financial crisis… New Year! The winter issue of The Moscow Times Moscow Guide is entirely devoted to New Years celebrations. Seven great ideas for celebrating the “Night of Nights” will help readers finalise their plans and choose how and where to party, give fresh ideas and lots of practical advice.

And don’t forget – problems will come by themselves, but happiness and luck need an invitation. That why the more cheerful and light-hearted your celebration of the coming holiday is, the happier and more successful 2009 will be for you.

The Crisis: Signs of a Kremlin Fearful Of Unrest
Sociologist Yevgeny Gontmakher has painted a disturbing picture of what might emerge from the financial crisis, forecasting continued unemployment, huge protests and spreading violence.

Market Matters: Huge Grain Harvest No Boon for Farmers
This year Russia is enjoying the biggest grain harvest it has ever seen -- and farmers couldn't be more worried.



Thursday, January 08, 2009 Updated at 31 December 2008 22:36 Moscow Time.

The Moscow Times » Issue 4035 » Always a Dissident

Doomed From the Start

20 November 2008By Boris KagarlitskyWe can say three things with certainty regarding reforms to international financial structures: They are necessary, inevitable and doomed to fail.

The Group of 20 summit held in Washington was destined to fail from the start because the participants held such widely divergent interpretations of the problem. It was also doomed because nobody had a solution plan that was clear or concrete enough.

The only thing that the G20 members could agree upon is the date of their next summit. Ideally, the participants would have become acquainted with each other's positions as a first step toward unified action. But even that would not have been enough because even if the participants had agreed on all of the issues and even if a coordinated solution had been developed, nothing useful would have come of it.

The old financial system is falling apart before our eyes, and it is impossible to build a new one its place. But no matter how hard the politicians and experts might try, a new and effective international financial model can be built only after the world's most developed countries institute radical social and economic reforms.

That new system would institutionalize on a global level the new principles guiding the lives of its member states. But none of today's world leaders is proposing any fundamental changes to their societies. What's more, politicians never address such questions at summits and conferences.

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At the end of World War II, the Bretton Woods agreement reflected the economic conditions in Europe and the United States at the time. The unbridled free market economy was subjected to new government regulation, and the domination of the bourgeoisie was replaced by a historical compromise between labor and capital. It was no coincidence that the chief architect of the Bretton Woods agreement was the eminent British economist John Maynard Keynes, whose name is connected with the era of mixed economy and the welfare state.

By the end of the 1980s, however, neoliberalism had replaced Keynesianism as the dominant economic model in Western countries. This paradigm was also adopted at leading international institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, whose origins date back to the Bretton Woods era. If their initial task had been to regulate markets, stop reckless financial speculation and promote socially responsible government policies, by the end of the 20th century the IMF and the World Bank had largely become libertarian tools for deregulation and privatization.

At the same time, these institutions underwent a radical and seemingly irreversible transformation. Although in a formal sense, they remain a part of the public sector and exist on funds from their founding member states, in reality they are becoming instruments of the global financial oligarchy. Most central banks have become independent of their respective governments, and they have shown more loyalty to the directors of private banks.

Therefore, until each country reforms its own central bank, it will be pointless to even discuss the emergence of a new international financial architecture. Over the past 20 years, the public sector has been destroyed and privatized. If that situation does not undergo radical changes, trying to reform the global financial system is a useless endeavor.

It is not the world's financial structures that needs to be reformed but society. If this were to ever happen, however, it would remove the need of having most of today's international institutions. In addition, the leaders who gather at the G20 and other global summits would become irrelevant as well.

Boris Kagarlitsky is the director of the Institute of Globalization Studies.