Fwd: Russia

'With oil prices down more than 50 percent in the past year and still falling, the ruble having lost more than half its value, a recession looming and the country already dipping into its rainy-day funds, the Russian economy is in a race against time. But one would be hard pressed to grasp the depth of the troubles from the Kremlin's prescriptions.

After Anton Siluanov, the finance minister, laid out the government's long-promised "anti-crisis" package in a live broadcast on state television last week, economists unanimously dismissed as inadequate his laundry list of half-measures and a vague promise of a 10 percent budget cut.

"That plan is nonsense," the Russian oligarch Aleksandr Y. Lebedev said in an interview, describing it as throwing away money to rescue some of Russia's worst companies. "Lots of words and little specific."

President Vladimir V. Putin weighed in briefly, repeating that along with keeping tight control over government finances, "We need to change our economy's structure."

Yet a wide array of business owners, economists and former senior government officials said in interviews that they expected the Kremlin to react to the crisis the way it had in 2008, the last time it faced a precipitous decline in oil prices — with disaster management, but no fundamental changes.

"They are trying to get by, manage it strategically and hope that oil prices rise, hope they can make a few adjustments and it will all go away," said Kenneth S. Rogoff, an economics professor at Harvard University who recently attended a high-level economics conference in Moscow. "There is no appetite for fundamental reform. They are just going to wait."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/03/world/europe/russia-details-plans-to-bolster-its-economy-but-experts-scoff.html?_r=0