A bit more from Simplicius the thin's article. Note that after 1991 there was extreme poverty in post-USSR Russia and now russians are much better off. A 12% income tax helps; people spend their own money carefully so less money is wasted.
Note how Russia peaked in its number of ‘credit institutions’, i.e. private banks, during the lawless post-Soviet collapse where Western finance completely took over and gutted the country. Western banking institutions flooded through Russia like a Wild West free-for-all. Then after Putin took over, the number of these institutions has gradually been dropping. In fact, the chart above goes only to 2015, and shows 600+ institutions at that point. Currently, Russia has dropped to a mere mid-300s. Do you see what’s happening?
Admittedly, a similar down trend is seen in the West. For instance, the U.S. had something like nearly ~20,000 financial institutions in the 80s, which dropped to ~6000 at the present. However, that came about by way of bank failures and endless mergers, where the biggest conglomerates continued gobbling each other up to get ever more powerful. It wasn’t, to my knowledge, a result of a deliberate campaign to cull the banks like in Russia.
Naturally, citing ‘financial experts’, the Forbes article laments these moves, characterizing them as some kind of reversion of Russia into a ‘primitive banking system’ which is meant to harm the nation in some way. Yet time has proven the sagacity of these actions, given that Russia has just officially surpassed Germany and moved to #5 on the world GDP PPP rankings, and has some of the best economic numbers in the world, insofar as inflation, unemployment, account balances, debt to gdp, and many other indicators. Clearly, they’re doing something right.
