The Russia stock market is down 71% from its peak in May. The size of their bubble as well as their corruption, makes ours look small by comparison. Oligarchs who borrowed huge from western banks using stock as collateral are suddenly in serious trouble. But lest we forget, the LTCM collapse in 1998 that nearly took out the world financial system was triggered by a Russian government loan default. But this time, just a paltry $47.5 billion is at risk. Whew. I’m glad we’re not talking real money or anything like that.

Bank runs in Russia are escalating too.

Wikipedia has a sobering timeline of the current Russian financial crisis.

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“Russia has gone back to being a colony for former KGB agents, who’ve changed in name only — a fuel-rich colony for a small group of oil and gas merchants who give nothing of their riches to anyone living outside the capital.”

– Journalist Yelena Tregubova, who was forced to seek asylum in Britain after receiving death threats for her reporting in Russia.

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Factions within the siloviki thugocracy that runs Russia, having exhausted the possibilities of looting outsiders, are turning on themselves and using the courts as weapons to jail each other. This from Robert Amsterdam, international defense counsel for jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky writing in the Inernational Harald Tribune.

Russia is far more volatile than anyone now wants to believe. We do ourselves no favor by generously pretending that Russia is going to hold some type of “flawed” vote, when the real election will be determined by the scorecard of the clan wars.

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This corrupt.. Government-connected raiders use police to arrest business owners on bogus charges then force the owner to sign over their business to them else in return for being released. This happens “thousands” of times a year in Moscow, according to the Moscow Times.

Robert Amsterdam, lawyer for jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, posted this video showing brutal beatings by guards in a Russian prison camp. The beatings appear to be random with the deliberate intention of terrifying the inmates. While anything emanating from the den of snakes that is the oligarchs should be treated cautiously, the video seems authentic.

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