Herman Gref’s fifteen-minute speech at the investment forum “Russia Calling” became the main event of the gathering.
If you read any of the reports or coverage from the forum, you’ll see that this is true. Even Putin’s speech drew little particular interest and is quoted roughly 146 times less often than Gref’s.
He didn’t seem to say anything especially remarkable, and yet it was such a hit.
The secret, it seems to me, is quite simple. It’s the same story as with the boy in the fairy tale who noticed that a certain king was wearing very little and said so outright.
Gref, after all, is not a little boy but a grown man who heads the largest bank in Eastern Europe, so he was more tactful than the boy, but he still did not lie from the podium—and the audience appreciated that.
- don’t waste your own time or anyone else’s with macroeconomics; nothing will work as long as the quality of public administration is this catastrophic; - what the hell kind of import substitution are we talking about when we depend on imports for everything and will continue to do so; - trillions are being poured into Federal Target Programs, which have achieved nothing over the past five years; - state-owned companies are inefficient, and the economy is monopolized. - businesspeople are thinking not about new ventures, but about where to obtain residency.
If you can’t be bothered to watch all 15 minutes, start from the 6-minute mark: that’s where the openly political part begins, without any of the economic mumbo jumbo.
Most likely, if Gref had said not, “public administrators of dreadful quality, taking their cue from incompetent Soviet rulers, are driving up social costs,” but something more like, “as a result of negative selection, the people in power are fools and thieves, taking their example from the late-Soviet Politburo fools who brought down the USSR, and whom they now commemorate with plaques all over Moscow,” he would have drawn not just applause, but a standing ovation.
But Herman Gref could not have said that: he is not the boy from the fairy tale, but a grown man heading the largest bank in Eastern Europe.
People