Regarding the history of how the rich Russians betrayed the country, I have to talk about the “shock therapy” that Harvard has customized for Russia.
At the end of 1999, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russian President Yeltsin was anxious for such an unfavorable situation facing the half-dead enterprises of the former Soviet Union, and 1 trillion rubles in domestic debt, plus 120 billion US dollars in foreign debt.
At this time, two western economists came to instruct the maze and handed Yeltsin a special medicine called “shock therapy.” It is said that these two economists were also professors at Harvard at the time.
On January 2, 1992, the “shock therapy” was officially implemented. The Russian government and Western economists all placed high hopes on this therapy, but what is unexpected is that shock therapy not only did not solve the problem of the death of enterprises in Russia. On the contrary, Russia’s prices have risen by 244 times in two years, and in the end even a large number of rich people are vying to sell Russia.
So, what caused the “shock therapy” to lose its efficacy?
It is said that in order to help the Russian government, two Western economists made a restructuring for them.
Because Russian companies were basically state-owned companies at that time, the first step in restructuring was how to turn these companies into publicly held companies like the United States.
The method is for each person to issue a few redemption coupons in exchange for equity. How did you change this? Let’s take a company as an example. If a company is worth 10,000 redemption coupons, and 100 coupons are issued to you, you can use these 100 coupons to redeem the company’s stock, that is, you can redeem 1% of the company’s equity.
If all the exchange vouchers of all state-owned enterprises were issued to the common people, and the common people took the vouchers to exchange for equity, all state-owned enterprises in Russia would become public shareholding companies.
After listening to the restructuring plan of the two economists, the Russian government found it feasible and began to implement it in large numbers.
But what they didn’t expect was that the common people in Russia never cut their 1% stake in this kind of company. Compared with the small shareholders of this kind of restructured enterprise, they would rather take a voucher to buy something to eat and drink.
It is said that after seven smart Russians knew the real needs of the people, they colluded with Russia’s state-owned Russian banks and local finances to engage in the black market for the purchase of exchange vouchers.
They first established a good relationship in Russia, and then used national money to purchase exchange vouchers on the national black market in Russia. Russian people took the exchange vouchers and went to the black market to exchange money. After the money was exchanged, they ran to eat and drink. Individuals take these redeemed coupons in exchange for equity in all state-owned enterprises.
In this way, Russia’s state-owned enterprise almost overnight became a private enterprise of these seven people.
When these people took all the state-owned enterprises in Russia into their pockets, they did not honestly engage in manufacturing to solve the development problems of these enterprises, and went to the other extreme: neither manufacturing nor real estate construction. . It’s because the money is too slow and troublesome to do these big projects.
As a result, they came to make money by selling them, such as digging out minerals and selling oil without processing them, and selling all fighter jets, and selling everything without processing. Later, they even found the hard work of mining and digging to be troublesome, and the things were still sold, but the buyers were allowed to dig by themselves, hurdle by themselves, mine by themselves…After finishing the buyer, they would take them away. It is said that the outcome of this reform in Russia at the time was that the wealth of Russia as a whole, calculated by GDP, was similar to that of Mexico, a small country in Central America.
This is the short-sighted end of capital once a state-owned enterprise is transformed into a private enterprise without fiduciary responsibilities. You must know that the process of capital chasing profits is that the simpler the better, and the higher the profit, the better.
