Funny how news loves to refer to russian companies as "giants". Russian oil "giant", search "giant", etc. Just an amusing fact.
The Ukraine war is madness and reflects a ruler with absolute power.
It's a blasphemy to capitalism to conflate those bandits with Western entrepreneurs that founded and built their own companies from scratch, even though they have their own set of issues.
t. someone from country which underwent that.
The very next day, on April 29, DHSC bought another 200 million face masks, this time contracting to pay £252.5 million to Ayanda Capital, a Tory party-linked firm also bumped into the VIP lane despite having no previous PPE experience. It is an investment company specialising in currency trading, offshore property and private equity.
To this day, no-one has been charged with any crime.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/ppe-procurement-scandal-u...
In the west, we call that "privatization", and it happens pretty frequently, and it's common for the process to be technically open, but practically exclude all but a handful of buyers.
It's also common for those buyers to make a lot of money from the assets before returning them to the state 20 years later, unmaintained and debt laden.
That's not even slightly true? It's headline news and massively controversial every time this happens.
In the UK, privatisation of Network Rail arches (which will 'break even' for the buyers in about ten years), privatisation or TfL land in London at below-market prices to property developers, and the backdoor privatisation of NHS services through public-private partnerships.
- 2010s? Hard to tell what you are referencing
- Not a real example (subcontracting is not the same as selling off state properties).
So yes, 2-3 examples from the UK over the past 2 decades is not really compelling.
> Can you name off the top of your head the last 3 significant privatizations?
I can list similar privatizations in Canada. Here's an article that discusses various issues around it in the Canadian context: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02648...
Even further back: during Prime Minister Mulroney's tenure (which coincided with Reagan's and Thatcher's), quite a few public corporations were privatized. Here's a news article from that time period that gives an idea of the pressures faced in Canada at the time, and how what Thatcher was doing in the UK (producing a long list of public corporations and services to privatize) was affecting Canadian judgements: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1985/08/30/d...
And here's an analysis of how the privatization of Canada's medical isotopes business didn't save the government money, and instead only helped to cushion private owners from risk: https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/chr.2019-0010
We also have a prominent think-tank that is constantly pushing for further privatization: https://www.fraserinstitute.org/article/time-privatize-gover...
Just some more evidence, from different time spans, in case you are serious.
You have now linked me to a paper discussing privatization happening in the 1980s and 1990s.
If you want to make the argument that this happens frequently in the west, you need to find examples actually happening this decade. I don't feel like this should be controversial.
If they were 'proper investors' they would cheaply buy up UK water companies, load them with debt, pay out 40 billion of dividends, and then enter talks with the government about insolvency.
The "America bad" crowd is so eager to say they're all the same that they intentionally look away from any nuance.
Not all American super wealthy are oligarch but some are very close to the mark. Borderline cases that are concerning: Elon Musk is an American oligarch. Bill Gates is an American oligarch.
Also can someone dump 4Gs of Google’s codebase somewhere?
https://kamilkazani.substack.com/p/avocado-economy-why-russi...
The term "oligarch" has a specific meaning and, surprisingly, Western media uses the term correctly about the subset of corrupt Russian and Ukrainian businessmen who got rich in the 1990s by buying billions worth of state monopolies for pennies.
I have never seen Russian tech billionaires like the JetBrains founders being called "oligarchs".
https://kamilkazani.substack.com/p/avocado-economy-why-russi...
While GDP may be lower than Italy and per capita is weak, a nation like Russia can probably accomplish an order of magnitude more large scale projects, and also sustain a certain economy climate for much much longer than we think.
So don't underestimate Russia, even though we'd like to think they're soon running out of steam to continue the war in Ukraine.
On just one axis of consideration, Italy has a blue water navy with power projection capabilities roughly similar to Russia and India, surpassed only by the United States, the UK and France.
I think Italy also ranks higher than most anglosphere laypeople would estimate in terms of GDP and scientific output, although this is hard to pin down since I'm talking about layperson perception. Basically, I think Italy is more relevant and capable than people generally give it credit for.
For example, Canada's inflation-adjusted per-capita GDP has supposedly increased over time, yet for many Canadians, the standard of living is now noticeably lower than it was (or would have likely been) two or three decades ago.
In terms of production, Canadian businesses and governments generally don't seem to have become more capable and productive, and actually seem to struggle now with the sorts of fundamental work that they managed to pull off in the past. Many common services and products are noticeably worse now than in the past, in terms of cost, quality, reliability, delivery time, and so forth.
GDP is a metric that I can't trust.
Italy: Size of the labor force from 2014 to 2024: ~23M
Number of pensioners in Russia from 2012 to 2022: ~44M
Italy population? ~58M
There are almost twice as many pensioners in Russia than people in the labour force in Italy and it's 2/3 of the whole Italy population. The whole GDP comparison here is moot.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/275312/labor-force-in-it...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1093953/number-of-retire...
My search threw up a few.
So “Russian [x] giant” really means “Putin’s favored [x] company”.
???
No, this is nonsense. The normal meaning of the word "lobbyist" is an _employee_ who uses political connections to push corporate interests. The normal meaning of the word "oligarch" is someone with large wealth. These two are not similar at all.
So the phrase you're looking for is probably "And billionaires are not billionaires, they're oligarchs".
2. a very rich business leader with a great deal of political influence (particularly with reference to individuals who benefited from the privatization of state-run industries after the collapse of the Soviet Union).