The Russian president said in a speech Thursday that the financial crisis in the United States should be taken as a sign that America's global economic leadership is drawing to a close, reiterating an argument that leaders here have been making for some time, though investors in recent weeks have been fleeing Russia and depositing money in U.S. Treasury bills.
Perhaps inevitably for a country long lectured to by the United States, Russia is using the occasion of the U.S. financial crisis to do some lecturing of its own.
President Dmitri Medvedev said Thursday that the U.S. crisis showed that "the times when one economy and one country dominated are gone for good." Speaking of the United States, Medvedev said the world no longer needed a "megaregulator."
Russia has argued that the freewheeling Anglo-American style of capitalism is to blame for the crisis, a position echoed by Germany and other Continental European nations. Medvedev even called it financial "egoism."
A drumbeat of similar pronouncements has been heard in Russia in recent days. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin made a major speech Wednesday on U.S. financial "irresponsibility," blaming the plunge of more than 50 percent in the Russian stock market on the global economic slowdown and U.S. financial turmoil, rather than on any troubles endemic to Russia. "The saddest thing is that we can see an inability to take appropriate decisions," Putin said in his speech after the U.S. House of Representatives rejected the Bush administration's bailout plan.
In contrast, the Russian bailout was decided by decree. "This is not the irresponsibility of some people but the irresponsibility of the system, which, as it is known, claimed to be the leader," Putin said.
Medvedev spoke Thursday at St. Petersburg State University during the eighth annual Petersburger Dialog, a forum devoted to developing relations with Germany and where he met with Chancellor Angela Merkel. Members of Merkel's government have also been critical of U.S. regulators.
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