Driven into Coal Comrade Belkovsky is absolutely on fire here, in both verb and subject: We have long been told that in contemporary Russian society, if the need is great enough, you can rob, kill, even sell your own mother. The only thing you absolutely must not do is crash the stock market. That market is our everything; it sounds proud, it contains all beginnings and ends. And the hero of our age is the stock speculator, capable of conjuring big money out of nothing, out of some niche, out of darkness, using nothing but insider information and a healthy dose of luck. The most terrible thing of all is to distract this stock speculator while he works and breathe down his neck. Or, generally speaking, to annoy the hero with petty arguments on a subject nobody asked about. These bedtime stories, of course, reflect the mental and intentional priorities of our ruling elite. But they do not reflect physical reality. Which rather plainly suggests that the state of the stock market is by no means a meaningful indicator of how the country is actually doing. ... And if tomorrow the Chinese flag were to fly over the tsarist Kremlin, the RTS Index would most likely go up, and model financial analysts would explain: clearly, the Russian Federation’s voluntary accession to the People’s Republic of China has had a highly beneficial effect on our economy; our financial market has become an organic part of another market—far larger and more powerful; liquidity has risen substantially and average volatility has declined. *An entertaining article; I recommend reading it. As for the “stock market problems” part, I agree with the author. I already briefly wrote about this. I’m sick of this endless nonsense about how the stock_market_investment_climate_is_painfully_reacting_to_irresponsible statements. There is one fundamental factor for our stock market: ’Merica. Until recently (and to a large extent still now), all our trading follows the S&P futures. If it’s up, we open higher; if not, we open lower. And whatever Putin said—that’s peanuts. It drops today, it bounces back tomorrow. Obviously, if we declared war on Brazil tomorrow, that would have an effect. But that’s exactly the kind of war we’re not going to declare.