Russia - Failure of a Market

Now, in 1992 Russia, the information was about as imperfect as you could get.
Here, there were generations of ppl with totally no notion of "private ownership"
- to them, it was more like "alien spaceship".
Even worse, nobody knew about property rights, much less how to enforce them, because they
hadn't existed for the past 70 yrs.

Jim Rogers put it in a pretty amusing way.
For instance, if you were the manager of a Soviet vodka factory, and if you had balls,
you could just pick the right time and say "This is my vodka factory".
There was nobody to stop you.
To the workers, nothing has changed because you were their boss anyway.
But you suddenly found yrself in ownership of a vodka factory.

In times of upheaval like this, the market breaks down, and very few ppl get very rich.
Roman Abramovich was one of them.

When Yeltsin needed more money in 1995, he auctioned off the remaining govt stakes in the companies.
Act it wasn't an auction. Most of the time, there was only one bidder, and he essentially walked away with the prize.

A look at how the Russian Rouble lost its value :
Jan 1992 - 230 per US$
Jan 1995 - 3500 per US$