Word: gerashchenko
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After a spectacular devaluation and default, what's a country to do? The answer from Russia's new central banker, VIKTOR GERASHCHENKO, is to print money, and lots of it. Printing presses are said to have been rolling for days, cranking out billions of nearly worthless rubles. Just how many have been printed is a state secret, but BORIS NEMTSOV, the 38-year-old (recently retired) Deputy Prime Minister, puts the figure at "between 9 billion and 12 billion rubles" (some $600 million to $800 million). Officially, the central bank only admits to printing "less than 1 billion" rubles...
Primakov also accepted the Duma's choice as the new head of the central bank, Viktor Gerashchenko. Actually, he is not new, as he was head of the bank twice before: once when many ordinary citizens had their savings wiped out by a disastrous reform in 1991, and again when the ruble sank 30% on a single day, Black Tuesday, in 1994. During both tours of duty, Gerashchenko was widely criticized for heedlessly printing rubles and pumping almost unlimited credit into rusting, unproductive industrial enterprises and collective farms...
...drastic steps to ease investors and panic-stricken Russians who dumped their national currency in exchange for durable goods and dollars as the ruble lost a quarter of its value yesterday. President Boris Yeltsin promptly sacked Finance Minister Sergei Dubinin and moved to fire the Central Bank chairman, Viktor Gerashchenko. He made it clear that he suspected foul play, calling the ruble's plunge an act "of sabotage or the manifestation of a policy of extreme irresponsibility and slovenliness by the special groups of people...
Though Yeltsin tried to keep him on, another top free-marketeer, Finance Minister Boris Fyodorov, resigned, saying he would not serve in a government that also retained the free-spending central-bank chief Viktor Gerashchenko. Three other reform ministers lost the rank of Deputy Prime Minister. Only one new economic thinker remained in the Cabinet: Anatoli Chubais, who heads the program that is successfully privatizing small businesses. "I see no tragedy in some people leaving the government," sniffed Chernomyrdin. "It is a natural process...
...contrary, Fyodorov responded, "this is a turn back." He forecast the government of Chernomyrdin and Gerashchenko would push inflation, now running at about 20% a month, up to 30% by April. "A collapse is inevitable," he said. The daily Izvestia agreed: "The government of reformers has ceased to exist." Two top Western economists, Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard University and Anders Aslund of Sweden, resigned as advisers to the government...