13.11.08

Russia has adopted quite a large set of comprehensive measures to minimize the consequences of the world financial crisis for the country, Viktor Khristenko, the Russian minister of industry and trade, told ltar-Tass on Tuesday after the talks with Christos Folias, the Hellenic minister of development.

Khristenko said these were comprehensive measures in two directions ¬ in the financial and the manufacturing sectors of the economy. “Vast programs of the development of the infrastructure in Russia will not be scaled down. Quite the contrary, they will be given more emphasis,” the minister assured. “Measures of regulation will be aimed, above all, properly to protect investment which has flown to Russia in the years of the steady growth of the Russian economy and has already been put to use.”

The Russian minister stressed, “The global financial crisis means not only increased risks but also heightened opportunities.” “Russia’s strategy in this sense is aimed at minimizing these risks and optimizing opportunities,” he said. “We intend to do this in close partnership with our friends and colleagues, including Greece.”

Khristenko believes the financial crisis that originated in the United States threatens other countries, specifically, “because of the extremely high degree of virtualization of the financial market.” “Since the US financial system with its infrastructure permeated the whole world, there are virtually no places on the globe unaffected by the crisis,” the minister said. “Because of this the actions of all national governments are quite identical. These are, above all, the allocation of budgetary funds from the states’ reserves to support the national financial infrastructure. Second, this is shifting the emphasis from the virtual to the real sector of the economy.”

“During the world financial crisis this will certainly lead to the strengthening of the regulating functions of the states regarding their national economies,” Khristenko noted. “This is now clearly seen across the world. Such a scope of financial intervention, actually nationalization, in many sectors of the economy as is observed in industrialized countries now would have seemed absurd a year ago, not to be taken seriously. And this is common practice now,” Khristenko said.

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Source: Itar-Tass