Back in April 2007, in the midst of the greatest commodities rally on record, OAO Gazprom (OGZD)’s deputy chief executive officer, Alexander Medvedev, was talking big.
Russia’s natural-gas export monopoly aspired to be the world’s largest company, he said while offering up a prediction: its market value would quadruple to $1 trillion in as little as seven years.
Medvedev was off by $910 billion. Since he made that forecast, no company among the world’s top 5,000 has suffered a bigger collapse in market capitalization than Gazprom, a $154 billion plunge that’s become emblematic of the malaise that has overtaken President Vladimir Putin’s economy. The state-run company has tumbled three straight years in the stock market as it stepped up spending on everything from the Olympic games in Sochi to projects in Siberia.
“Gazprom is a champion in value destruction,” Ian Hague, founding partner of New York-based Firebird Management LLC, which manages $1.3 billion of assets including Russian stocks, said by phone April 2. “It’s not just Gazprom that failed to achieve its goal of increasing market capitalization. It’s Russia who failed. It failed to create an environment where state-owned companies would function as shareholder-owned entities.”
Now wonder then that "life under Putin is one continuous downward spiral into despair":
In most countries, the happiness curve bottoms out somewhere around middle age -- 47 in the United States and 41 in Britain, for instance. This usually happens long before the average person is expected to die, with one major exception: Russia. In Russia the curve doesn't bottom out until age 91. Essentially, life under Putin is one continuous downward spiral into despair.
Graham explains it bluntly: "What's going on in Russia is deep unhappiness." In the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Better Life Index, for instance, Russians rated their general life satisfaction a 3.0 out of 10. Three-quarters of Russians are "struggling" or "suffering," with only 25 percent "thriving," according to their responses to a 2012 Gallup survey. Contrast these figures with the United States, where life satisfaction is a robust 7.6 and nearly 60 percent are thriving.
At least American millennials can expect life to get better for three full decades after they hit rock bottom. In Russia, the only thing to look forward to is death's sweet embrace.
Russia’s natural-gas export monopoly aspired to be the world’s largest company, he said while offering up a prediction: its market value would quadruple to $1 trillion in as little as seven years.
Medvedev was off by $910 billion. Since he made that forecast, no company among the world’s top 5,000 has suffered a bigger collapse in market capitalization than Gazprom, a $154 billion plunge that’s become emblematic of the malaise that has overtaken President Vladimir Putin’s economy. The state-run company has tumbled three straight years in the stock market as it stepped up spending on everything from the Olympic games in Sochi to projects in Siberia.
“Gazprom is a champion in value destruction,” Ian Hague, founding partner of New York-based Firebird Management LLC, which manages $1.3 billion of assets including Russian stocks, said by phone April 2. “It’s not just Gazprom that failed to achieve its goal of increasing market capitalization. It’s Russia who failed. It failed to create an environment where state-owned companies would function as shareholder-owned entities.”
Now wonder then that "life under Putin is one continuous downward spiral into despair":
In most countries, the happiness curve bottoms out somewhere around middle age -- 47 in the United States and 41 in Britain, for instance. This usually happens long before the average person is expected to die, with one major exception: Russia. In Russia the curve doesn't bottom out until age 91. Essentially, life under Putin is one continuous downward spiral into despair.
Graham explains it bluntly: "What's going on in Russia is deep unhappiness." In the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Better Life Index, for instance, Russians rated their general life satisfaction a 3.0 out of 10. Three-quarters of Russians are "struggling" or "suffering," with only 25 percent "thriving," according to their responses to a 2012 Gallup survey. Contrast these figures with the United States, where life satisfaction is a robust 7.6 and nearly 60 percent are thriving.
At least American millennials can expect life to get better for three full decades after they hit rock bottom. In Russia, the only thing to look forward to is death's sweet embrace.
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