Today I’m in Kazan, where I’m opening our campaign headquarters. And by coincidence, Kazan has ended up in the headlines of national news across Russia.
The license of Tatfondbank, the country’s second-largest regional bank, has been revoked. One bank dragged down another, and now four of the republic’s five biggest banks have effectively collapsed. Tatarstan’s banking system is fairly developed—people keep their savings in local banks. And now, in the second act of this drama, depositors are trying to storm the government building:
In Tatfondbank alone, people held 75 billion rubles in deposits; some of them will get their money back through the deposit insurance program (but not anytime soon, and they’ll have to work for it to receive it).
But some people will lose securities, some had deposits above the insured limit, and so on. All these “over-the-limit depositors” and “splitters”, as is clear even from the video, are ordinary people—not oligarchs.
Some will lose their homes, some their cars. Some will see the money they saved for their children’s education vanish. Some won’t be able to pay for surgery. Some will see their businesses ruined.
And in effect, the authorities—the Central Bank, the government, and United Russia (the ruling political party)—are smiling in these people’s faces, shrugging, and saying: well, it was a risk. You were depositors. The money is gone, you’re ruined. That’s how a market economy works. (The bank was headed by a senior local United Russia official, and the supervisory board was chaired by the head of government.)
The Central Bank (represented by Elvira Nabiullina, a great “friend” of our campaign) is refusing a bailout: it’s your own fault.
And here I can’t help but recall our investigation into Medvedev’s palaces. There, too, everything revolved around loans and bank credit.
And as far as we can tell, nobody ever intended to repay those loans.
You get a loan, build a palace, buy a yacht — and then the debt is simply written off as unrecoverable.
Gazprombank somehow manages just fine to cover the holes Medvedev leaves in its capital. And no one is chasing after our Dimon (a nickname for Dmitry Medvedev), shouting, this is a market economy—pay back the money or sell the palace.
Adam Smith would be amazed to learn how the market works in Putin’s Russia: Medvedev doesn’t have to return other people’s money, while the residents of Kazan can’t get back their own. And apparently it’s all legal. The police have no complaints about Medvedev, but they certainly do about the depositors.
The amount of corrupt money funneled into Medvedev’s foundations is several times greater than what would be needed to compensate honest people—the depositors of Tatarstan’s banks.
But what do you think yourselves? Who will lose their savings—Dimon or the depositors?
And subscribe if, in our country, ordinary people are taking greater risks than high-ranking crooks.