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By Ian Bremmer
The opinions expressed are his own,http://www.airjordanpascherrfr4.com/.

After a week full of anti-government and pro-government protests, Russians woke up on Monday to big news,Giubbotti Moncler. Mikhail Prokhorov, a political novice with billions of dollarsand the New Jersey Nets to his name, announced his Presidential bid.? Alexei Kudrin, a longtime bureaucratic infighter, also declared his plans to re-enter the political arena. These developments were even more significant considering both were ousted in rather public quarrels with the powers that be just months ago. Kudrin said he would support and aid a pro-reform liberal party that would stand as a counterweight to the incumbent United Russia. Prokhorov intends to challenge Putin for the presidency in March 2012 on a platform that would appeal to Russia’s “disenchanted middle class.”

No matter what Kudrin and Prokhorov say in public, they both represent the same thing to Russia and the world: Vladimir Putin’s iron grip on power. As I’ve written before, on the planet. To think that either man would risk his freedom or his fortune to oppose Putin’s Kremlin, no matter what their stated reasons are, is just wrong. That said, there are reasons to watch this “race” as it will give some insight into Putin’s inevitable third term as president.

Putin has had to deal with a growing sense of dissatisfaction in Russia as of late.? Growth and living standards are stagnating, while economic inequality persists. It is unclear whose pockets are being lined with the wealth generated by Russia’s massive natural resources. The lack of freedom of the press, centralized control over economic opportunity,Moncler Outlet Online, and pervasive corruption that makes a mockery of the justice and security systems and other institutions, are Putin’s levers of power– and also the focal points for protesters. The protestors’ complaints crystallized last week over United Russia, Putin’s party, winning a smaller but still strong majority in the parliamentary elections. Accusations of election fraud were widespread and . Putin has not been in a position to crack down on these protests — they’re too visible and too widespread — but be sure that the oligarchs and ruling classes in Russia are on Putin’s side. While his tactics for retaining power have had to change, the outcome is the same.

Monday, a pro-United Russia rally in Moscow had the distinct air of a made-for-media event, with the college kids in attendance in order to compel them to turn out to show their “support” for the current regime. But the numbers, even if not to the extent that the state television claims, were there. Though Prokhorov and Kudrin will deny it endlessly, their candidacies are without a doubt sanctioned by the Kremlin. Just this year, Prokhorov was the leader of a pro-business liberal party that was created by and quite obviously aligned with the Kremlin. He quit because of a falling out with one of Putin’s Kremlin advisors — but it was not a falling out so great that Prokhorov became persona non grata. Quite the opposite,jordan, Prokhorov’s political resurrection may prove too useful for either Putin or the Kremlin middlemen to pass up,http://www.2012moncleroutletsitoufficiale.com/.

Prokhorov has not forgotten that he owes his fortune and therefore his allegiance to Putin. As he already stated in his press conference, he doesn’t plan to dwell on attacking Putin (no more than 10% of his platform will be anti-Putin), but rather would like to talk about his plans for Russia. Kudrin has all but ignored Putin in laying out his case for a new party,Piumino Moncler. Imagine if Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney came out tomorrow and said they were done attacking President Obama and wanted to focus solely on their plans for the U.S. Both Kudrin and Prokhorov represent ‘acceptable opposition’ to Moscow. That’s a recipe for a gracious but certain defeat. Kudrin owes his allegiance to Putin for slightly different reasons, but the result is the same: both candidates exist to draw off votes and appease the intellectual classes who are disenchanted with Putin’s leadership. But they will do nothing to keep Putin from a third term as President.

Putin will run a campaign — he will go to a supermarket, complain that prices are too high, and prices will be lowered. He will find some way to distribute a token amount of the natural resource wealth to the public, such as ordering a price cap on gasoline.? He will spend the money it takes to make a noticeable impact for his base. He’ll make the gestures to the public and the media that he deserves a third term. And he’ll get it,moncler sito ufficiale.

What will be interesting is whether Putin makes any adjustments to his leadership style upon winning that third term. Will he embrace some limited reforms? Will he attempt to prepare Russia for a day when he is no longer president,air jordan france? Putin,Moncler Sito Ufficiale, as president and now prime minister, has spent years gutting Russia’s institutions, in order to consolidate power. Could that, in the face of these protests, begin to be reversed, ever so slightly?

Whatever occurs in Russia, be sure that this is no ,Moncler Outlet Online. Changes are a long way off in Putin’s Russia. But the reemergence of Prokhorov and Kudrin in the political arena may just indicate that the Kremlin is toying with an idea of reform.

This essay is based on a transcribed interview with Bremmer.

Photo: Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov speaks during a news conference in Moscow December 12, 2011. Prokhorov announced on Monday his intention to run for president during the March 2012 election. REUTERS/Sergei Karpukhin

“You didn’t build that.”

“Corporations aren’t people.”

With the first, a revealing gaffe, and the second, a wildly cheered campaign refrain, one party has certainly made it clear how it feels about American business these days.

It ain’t good.

Well, big surprise, we don’t agree. We consider entrepreneurs American heroes and, as we’ve opined recently, we think many corporations brim with humanity. Business can’t operate unfettered, of course, without any form of oversight or control. But our view, essentially, is that business is a source of great good for society, with the power to create hope and opportunity like no other institution going.

Indeed, the positives so outweigh the negatives that lately we’ve been trying to identify why some people hate business so fervently. After all, the risks of this movement’s efforts to demonize business are frighteningly high.

Here’s where we’ve landed.

First,jordan pas cher, there’s clearly a group of people that disdains business because they support some or all of the fundamental leveling tenets of socialism. This ideology is too multifaceted to summarize here and is well-known in any regard, but suffice it to say that its adherents believe, as the president once put it, “You’ve got to spread the wealth around.”

Then there are people who hate business not because of ideology but because of personal experience they’ve been wrongly fired, endured a dreadful boss, or watched a schmoozer get the promotion that, by rights, belonged to someone better. Whatever the specifics, these individuals see business as a place where good people get burned.

For still others,air jordan, their hostility derives from the recent financial meltdown, when the sheer negligence of many financial institutions and rating agencies, they believe, resulted in blameless Americans losing their jobs and their homes and threatened to bring down the entire economy.

Finally, and perhaps most pernicious because of its outsize influence,moncler outlet, is the hostility toward business that radiates from the intellectual elite the opinion leaders in journalism, academia and government. To them, business is rotten because it’s just so completely unfair. Otherwise, how do you explain the success of the party animal who lived down the hall in college?

You know what we mean. With the intellectual elite,Moncler Outlet, you have a group of people who, once upon a time,Moncler, took their studies very seriously, ran their college newspapers and clubs and protested for social justice in their free time. After graduation, they took jobs where they felt they could fight the good fight, even if it meant financial sacrifice. That was all well and good until 10 or 15 years out, when they started hearing stories about the obnoxious loudmouths in their college dorms who majored in playing the angles and minored in beer pong. These “lightweights” (in their view) had, horrifyingly, struck it rich on Wall Street. And not by making the world a better place. No simply by showing up and chumming around.

O.K., so maybe that is enough to make you hate business.

Except, you shouldn’t. First of all, even if Wall Street allows some former party animals to make a fortune, Wall Street is but a piece of American business. It may show up in movies and on TV as the archetype, but far more of U.S. business consists of consumer and manufacturing companies making and selling real stuff, family-run enterprises, startups, farms, sports teams, ice cream shops,Giubbotti Moncler, art galleries, summer camps, record labels you name it. American business is what America does every day.

But just as important, you shouldn’t vilify American business because it’s our only road back to a thriving country, free of the noose of debt and offering opportunity to all who are willing to work, create,nike air jordan, compete and grow.

Everyone knows that our economy must improve, but it can only improve in an environment that encourages business and, yes, even loves it. Atmosphere matters. When hostility reigns, big enterprises worry about the regulations coming down the pike that might crimp operations and profits, and most hunker down on the capital spending front, human and otherwise. Entrepreneurs worry it’s not the right time or climate to expand, borrow on their credit line or hire, and they do the same,nike air jordan.

Look, if you want jobs and who doesn’t? you have to come to terms with reality. Hating business doesn’t just hurt business,http://www.monclersitooutlettufficiale.com/.

It destroys the way forward for everyone,http://www.airjordanmagasinfrrr.com/.

Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric for 21 years and is the founder of the . Suzy Welch is an author, speaker and the former Editor of the Harvard Business Review.

PHOTO: An Occupy Wall Street activist takes part in a march in downtown Manhattan in New York, July 11, 2012. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

EMTA, formerly the Emerging Markets Traders Association, had an interesting panel on the Ecuador default today. It was a bit lopsided: no one on the debtor side — and EMTA invited the country’s own representatives, as well as its lawyers and bankers, and even the US Treasury — would agree to attend. As such, it was really a panel of private-sector participants, and felt much like a wake: it was clear that with the success of Ecuador’s exchange offer, the country has won and the private sector has lost.

In the long term, of course, Ecuador might not have benefitted all that much from its antics: Erich Arispe, of Fitch Ratings, pointed out that the country is paying out much more in cash payments for its bonds than it would have had to pay over the next couple of years in coupon payments. On top of that, Ecuador is racking up lots of new debt to multilateral institutions like the Andean Development Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank, so even its fiscal position isn’t really improving.

But in the short term, Ecuador has elegantly managed to buy back a very large chunk of its debt at just 35 cents on the dollar. Old Ecuador hand Hans Humes, of Greylock Capital, summed up how spectacularly successful the Ecuador strategy was, calling it “one of the most elegant restructurings that I’ve seen”,Moncler Outlet Online;.

In hindsight, the deal could hardly have been done any better. First and most important was the matter of timing: as all the panelists agreed, there’s no way that Ecuador could have pulled this stunt in 2006 or even the first half of 2007. But the country was playing the long game: president Rafael Correa was elected president, on a platform which included debt repudiation, in January 2007; Ecuador’s clear intention to default on its debt earned it a pretty much immediate CCC rating from Fitch. Yet the default didn’,http://www.monclersitoufficialeiitaly.com/;t happen until December 2008, almost two full years after Correa’s election.

The wait turned out to be the best thing that Ecuador could have done, because in the interim the global debt markets were plunged into turmoil. And Correa didn’t pull the trigger until he could see the whites of his opponents eyes: he announced that he was defaulting on the 2012 global bonds at exactly the time that three huge hedge funds, which held Ecuador’s debt, were being forced by their prime brokers to liquidate their holdings. As a result, the selling pressure on Ecuadorean bonds sent them tumbling from the 70s to the 20s almost overnight.

They would have fallen further, into the waiting arms of a small army of hungry vulture funds eager to get back into the distressed-debt game after many years essentially being priced out of it. But then Ecuador pulled its next smart stunt: it used Banco del Pacifico, a large Ecuadorean bank, to start buying bonds at levels above 20 cents on the dollar. That was just high enough that the vultures didn’t want to amass a large position, and ensured that any future restructuring would face little organized opposition just because Ecuador’s bondholders were so fragmented.

Ecuador’s next clever step was to pay cash for its defaulted bonds, rather than trying to do a bond exchange. That meant that it didn’,nike air jordan;t need to go through a laborious SEC registration process, during which the legality of the Banco Pacifico stunt would surely have been questioned. And its final clever step was not to put forward a take-it-or-leave-it offer, as Argentina did, which would allow bondholders to agitate for a mass “no” vote. Instead, they just asked bondholders to name their price.

Of course that’s what the bondholders did. None of them wanted to be left as holdouts, given the ease with which Ecuador could change the covenants on the bonds, and also the fact that they hadn’t even managed to accelerate the 2030 global bonds by the time the default happened.

Joe Kogan of Barclays Capital said that bondholders’ inability to accelerate the 30s doesn’t just show a collective action problem. “It demonstrates that people weren’t really willing to hold on to the bonds, and that the original investors who had these bonds were trying to get rid of them,” he said: no one, in the present environment, had any appetite at all for litigation which could drag out for years,piumini moncler.

No one expected Ecuador to pull this particular rabbit out of the hat. The country has a reputation for utter incompetence when it comes to fiscal matters, and a few months ago it fired its highly-respected and long-standing legal counsel, Cleary Gottlieb,http://www.airjordanpascherrfr4.com/. Somehow, however, this exchange offer was probably the most successful and least fraught debt restructuring in the history of Latin American sovereign defaults.

The multilaterals played their part, by condoning Ecuador’,Piumino Moncler;s actions and basically ,Doudounes Moncler, despite the fact that the country had no fiscal need to default. And Argentina, weirdly, helped too: holdouts there have got very little to show for their litigation to date, and indeed Argentina was in New York this week for basically ignoring a judge’s orders to keep certain funds in the US. It was a legal victory for bondholders, but won’t help them get any richer.

And of course it also helped that Ecuador was so small. Even with the bonds at par, they accounted for only about 0.5% of the emerging-market index, which means that at this year’s prices Ecuador constituted about one quarter of one percent of a diversified EM portfolio. You could fight them, but when your portfolio is down 20% for other reasons,moncler doudoune, what’s the point.

Kogan was sanguine on the question of whether Ecuador’s default would into other emerging-market sovereigns. Most countries with bonds outstanding have some kind of access to the bond market, he pointed out; Ecuador hasn’t been able to issue debt in years, so losing access was no big deal for Ecuador, as it would be for most other countries. Ecuador also isn’t going to suffer as much in terms of economic costs as other countries might — its corporations aren’t going to lose bond-market access either (because they never had access) and it’s not going to suffer a bout of hyperinflation, because it’s dollarized. And although the last Ecuadorean president to default did immediately get kicked out of office, this one was re-elected comfortably, so there aren’t the kind of political costs that you’d expect in other countries. The only real new costs to Ecuador might come in a few years, if holdouts manage to attach Ecuador’s oil exports in one way or another — but given the success of the exchange offer, there probably won’t be any holdouts, or Ecuador could continue to pay them their coupons, just as it’s continuing to pay the coupons on its old Brady bonds which weren’t tendered into the 2000 exchange.

Hans Humes, however, was more worried about Ecuador setting a precedent. “As much as we can say this is an outlier, any country which runs into trouble has a great blueprint now of how to do it,” he said. The last time Ecuador defaulted, it was reasonably constructive, at least in hindsight: it hired Cleary Gottlieb, a big financial-markets law firm, it entered into dialogue with creditors including the Dart family, and it was criticized in for paying too much to bondholders rather than too little,Doudoune Moncler Femme. No one can accuse it of that this time around.

“The world has changed,” said Humes — we’re now living in a world where not only Ecuador can default, but Iceland can default as well. And that’s a world where defaults by small emerging-market countries simply don’t have the systemic consequences that everybody thought they might have. I even heard Humes say something I never thought I’d hear a died-in-the-wool buy-sider like him say: “Maybe,” he said, the solution to “go back to Anne Krueger’s model”

He was referring to , the attempt by then IMF first deputy managing director Anne Krueger to create a sovereign bankruptcy court. Not a single private-sector player thought this was a good idea, as far as I could tell, and certainly no one on the buy side had any time for the idea. But now, it’s clearly better than nothing — and nothing is what bondholders are ending up with these days. “The official sector’s already beaten us,” said Humes. If you’re going to capitulate to Ecuador,Giubbotti Moncler, then capitulating to the IMF is easy in comparison.