A series of devastating accounting scandals at Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco, to name a few, have shaken the public's trust in the ethics and business practices of America's large corporations. What are the underlying factors behind this recent wave of scandals? Is deregulation the culprit? If so, do we need more regulation or merely better enforcement of existing regulations? Does the confluence of corporate lobbying and campaign contributions encourage corporate malfeasance? If so, what political reforms are necessary?

To this day, neither the IMF or other transition scholars have yet proposed any real reform of Russia's banks. Rather, they, as exemplified in this most recent IMF paper, choose to reiterate shopworn cliches, and then wonder why Russia's banks, and its economy in general, remain in need of reform.

China grows at 8% a year, while the IMF tells Russia, which cannot even recover from the Great Contraction of the 1990s, to reduce inflation by a few percentage points.

Data published by the Central Bank of Russia showed that the real effective exchange rate (the real trade-weighted exchange rate) of the ruble had only modestly increased 4.9% during the first half (H1) of 2002 compared with H1 of 2001 and a smaller 1.2% compared with H2 of 2001. The data are suggestive of a possible shift in direction, from real appreciation of the ruble to real depreciation of the ruble.