Chrystia Freeland

For anyone who ever hoped Russia could become a liberal, free-market democracy, the grim trial last month of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former oil tycoon who was once his country’s richest man, offered a slender solace—it was widely and loudly condemned.

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, compared the prosecution to that of the late poet and Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky. Joe Nocera, writing about the business and economic consequences in The New York Times (whose global edition is the International Herald Tribune), described the Kremlin’s tactics as “boneheaded.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that the case would “have a negative impact on Russia’s reputation,” and particularly on its “investment climate.” What was notable about this chorus of foreign criticism was the implication that, even judged by the Kremlin’s own standards of realpolitik, the treatment of Mr. Khodorkovsky was a mistake. Moscow’s leaders want to restore Russia’s wealth and greatness: Western assertions that the Khodorkovsky trial had hurt Russia’s reputation and would discourage foreign investment suggested that the Kremlin was harming its own cause.

But some investors, economists and political analysts are drawing a different, and much starker, conclusion: The Khodorkovsky verdict was an inevitable and logical act of self-preservation by a regime that is fully and lucratively in control of Russia.

In this reading, there is nothing accidental about Mr. Khodorkovsky’s continued imprisonment. It is, instead, the clearest possible statement of the rules of Kremlin capitalism, and of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s confidence that, at least as long as Siberia has oil, there is plenty of private capital willing to play.

“Within Russia, everyone who matters understands exactly what the Kremlin is trying to say – that there is no one above the rule of the Kremlin,” said Roland Nash, co-founder of Verno Capital and a 16-year veteran of doing business in Moscow.

The January/February issue of The Atlantic features Chrystia’s cover story, “The Rise of the New Global Elite.” The piece discusses the rise in income inequality over the past few decades, how today’s tycoons are more likely to be self-made and cosmopolitan than the plutocrats of the past, and how the new elite have more in common with the nouveau riche in emerging markets than with their own countrymen.

Chrystia was on Morning Joe this morning to preview the article along with James Bennett, The Atlantic‘s editor-in-chief. Here’s the video of their conversation:

And, here is an excerpt from Chrystia’s piece in the Atlantic:

Before the recession, it was relatively easy to ignore this concentration of wealth among an elite few. The wondrous inventions of the modern economy—Google, Amazon, the iPhone—broadly improved the lives of middle-class consumers, even as they made a tiny subset of entrepreneurs hugely wealthy. And the less-wondrous inventions—particularly the explosion of subprime credit—helped mask the rise of income inequality for many of those whose earnings were stagnant.

Though the ongoing crisis in Europe dominated Chrystia’s interview with Dominique Strauss-Kahn last Thursday, the IMF head has much to say about the economic outlook for the United States. He believesthe biggest issue facing the U.S. right now is growth — not deficits — although he added that America needs a medium-term plan for fiscal consolidation.

Last week’s passage of the tax compromise should raise America’s growth prospects, but in response to a question about whether the tax cuts on high-earners are stimulative, Strauss -Kahn said, “of course not”.

When asked about the Federal Reserve’s latest round of quantitative easing, Strauss-Kahn endorsed the move, saying it will restore growth both outside and inside the U.S.:

Yesterday,  IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn sat down with Chrystia at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., for an hour-long Newsmaker interview. The European sovereign debt crisis dominated most of the conversation. The IMF chief admitted that the situation “worried” him and that he wanted Europeans to find a more “comprehensive” solution:

Well, I’m worried. And that’s why I’m urging the Europeans — I just attended the Euro Group meeting, which is the group of the finance minister of the eurozone — two weeks ago. I’m urging for the European Union to provide a comprehensive solution. Because this piecemeal approach, which the deal with Greece — as was Ireland after, and maybe another country later on — obviously doesn’t work. And the markets are just waiting for what’s next …  The institutions are still thinking too local when they’re facing global problems.

A more comprehensive solution will require better coordination among national European governments.  As Strauss-Kahn said, “You can’t have a single currency, especially in times where you have troubles, without having more coordination in economic policy.” Two concrete proposals the managing director endorsed were stronger stress tests for the banking sector and an increase in resources for the European Financial Stability Facility, the European bailout fund.

No man is a hero to his valet. That caution seems more true today than ever. Indeed, in the age of WikiLeaks, the stubborn indelibility of e-mail, and a democratized, 24/7 cybermedia that are avid to feed what turns out to be our insatiable appetite for details of the private behavior of public figures, you could take that proverb further and say all of us now know what the valet did, and that’s why there aren’t any heroes any more.

And yet Richard Holbrooke, who died so tragically and so abruptly this week, was a great man even in this WikiLeaks age. As I have been reading the public and private tributes to him, and talking about him with his many, many other friends, I have realized that he turned the old aphorism on its head: Described by the U.S. President as “a giant” and remembered in a front-page obituary in The New York Times Mr. Holbrooke was even more beloved and admired by those closer to him. If he had had a valet, I suspect he would have mourned and respected Mr. Holbrooke the most of all.

If I hadn’t known him, I’m sure that assertion would have surprised me because, as you can divine even from the glowing public tributes, he was no pussycat and he wasn’t Mother Teresa either. He was a bully, and not only when negotiating with Bosnian and Afghan warlords, but also in his dealings with less exotic (though in the view of some people, equally noxious) creatures such as journalists. In a beautiful appreciation of him this week, veteran diplomatic writer Carla Anne Robbins captured this quality with her recollection of Mr. Holbrooke as “one of the most unapologetic spinners” she had ever known. He had a powerful sense of his own importance and a theatrical view of the world—with himself, of course, usually cast in a central role.

Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty stopped by the Reuters studio this morning to chat with Chrystia about the impact of Europe’s debt crisis on Canada. He said the situation in Europe “poses a danger” and that if it gets out of control, the crisis could lead to a repeat of what happened to the financial markets in 2008. He urged the Europeans to follow the course America took in 2008 and substantially increase the amount of capital in the stabilization fund:

Jim Flaherty: They should imitate what the Americans did quite frankly in 2008 and create a situation where the markets regain confidence in sovereign debt and banking situations. And that means a substantial fund put together or they could do it with bonds and that’s been another suggestion, but a substantial pool that would make it clear that they would be able to defend and protect sovereigns and banking systems in Europe.

Chrystia Freeland: And that pool should be bigger than the one they have now?

Jim Flaherty: Yes

Chrystia Freeland: How much?

Jim Flaherty: Well, I’ll leave that, you know, for them to decide but it needs to be such that the markets would have full confidence, so substantially more than it is right now.

Chuck Schumer, the senior Democratic senator from New York, already has one of his talking points for 2012 — he plans to lambaste the Republicans for their “tax cuts for millionaires,” a reference to the right’s refusal to end the Bush tax breaks at the upper-end of the income distribution.

That’s a big deal, because for much of the post-war era, class has been a forbidden subject in U.S. politics. Americans were sold on the idea of living in the land of opportunity — their country, after all, was the one huddled masses fled to for the chance to build a better life. That self-image was so appealing and so powerful that politicians ran against it at their peril—Morning in America played better on the campaign trail than class war.

Schumer is a centrist whose constituency includes many of America’s plutocrats —he has sometimes been called the Senator from Wall Street. He is also one of the country’s savviest politicians. So his judgment that “millionaires tax break” will make a good bludgeon for Republicans says a lot about how deep the chasm has become between America’s super-elite and everyone else, and how worried middle-class Americans are that the old promise of social mobility is no longer delivering.

Nouriel Roubini is #12 on on Foreign Policy’s list of the 100 Top Global Thinkers of 2010. Over the past few years, the economist at New York University says he’s been thinking most about why financial crises occur and whey they are occurring more frequently than we have expected.

Contrary to the conventional notion that crises are random and infrequent events, Roubini has been arguing for the better part of a decade that financial crises can be predicted based on macroeconomic and policy mistakes. In fact, they occur every few years in some country around the world, he says. Roubini characterizes these financial crises as a “white swan” event. He emphasizes their regularity in his recent book Crisis Economics. Roubini says the pattern of crises is always the same: initially there is an economic boom, which drives up asset prices, leading to an excessive build-up of debt and leverage, which eventually leads to a downturn and then a market crash and bust.

The co-founder of Roubini Global Economics, Roubini credits his 20 years of experience studying financial crises in emerging markets — he published a book about their causes and consequences in 2004 — for enabling him to spot the risks for a crash. He also notes that others who foresaw the crisis, such as Morgan Stanley Asia’s Steve Roach and then-Merrill Lynch economist David Rosenberg, share a global view of economic dynamics, intellectual courage and a certain outsider status, a characteristic that fellow FP Global Thinker Mohamed El-Erian said was vital for his own success.

Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business is #26 on Foreign Policy’s list of the 100 Top Global Thinkers of 2010. His big idea is: “capitalist economies work well when everybody has access to the basic conditions they need to compete: access to education, access to health care, and access to finance.” In the absence of these conditions, Rajan argues that a capitalist society will be beset by income inequality, political frictions, and rent-seeking behaviors that subvert healthy competition. Capitalism is at its best when it creates equal opportunity:

If we all started off at age 21, 22, somewhere there, with all the education we needed, all the access to finance we wanted, and reasonable health, and we were told, ‘Here’s a level playing field. Go out and compete.’ And 25 years later some did very well, some did not so well, I think we would all be reasonably satisfied with that outcome. And that’s really the ideal of capitalism. But we’re very far from that ideal. Where you’re  born matters a lot. Of course, what you make of it also matters, but to the extent that you can reduce the impact of where you’re born, what conditions you’re born under, and what kind of impediments that creates, I think capitalism is better for it.

Rajan’s recent book, Fault Lines — the most recommended book on FP’s survey of the Global Thinkers — looks at the recent financial crisis through this lens. In the lead-up to the crisis, many citizens of the United Stated lacked access to higher education, a prerequisite for many of today’s jobs. Median wages stagnated as a result, and the government faced pressure to do something about it. Washington responded with the short-term fix of expanding cheap credit, notably through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which temporarily masked the rise in income inequality but ultimately did nothing to address the structural issues of the U.S. economy.

Reuters editor-at-large Chrystia Freeland interviews international investor Jim Rogers, as part of the 2011 Reuters Investment Outlook Summit.

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