I'll give it a shot (full disclosure, I have not been to Russia but have a keen interest in the country): "and oh, goodness, weren’t there just a great number

I'll give it a shot (full disclosure, I have not been to Russia but have a keen interest in the country): "and oh, goodness, weren’t there just a great number of these in unregulated America?" Europe which is much more stringently regulated has the same (or even bigger) problems than the USA – so does Japan. So to blame everything on the Americans is not a 100% correct. Some of these regulations (e.g. Community Reinvestment Act) even had a hand in the cause of the economic troubles. Europe's “well regulated” banks are falling just as fast as American banks. “Here he was, blowing up civilians in apartment buildings in ...” Blaming Putin for the Russian apartment bombings is standard conspiracy stuff. It is like blaming Bush for 911. “nationalizing all resource companies, “ The Russian oligarchy obtained most of the state assets in a pretty corrupt way during the Yeltsin era. I am pretty sure that pure nationalisation of assets would not be bad. (even though Putin is corrupt). “working on re-constituting the old Soviet Union,” What did Putin do to “reconstruct” the Soviet Union? Even its closets allies (and component states of the Soviet Union) were forced to pay market prices for natural gas (e.g. Belarus) – i.e. Russia stopped subsidising them. “while people like me were warning investors for the last couple of years to get as far from Moscow as they could (too bad BP didn’t listen). “ Hindsight is always 20/20. “The system, instead of being diverse and robust, is a monoculture with no life to it.” The economy was in pretty dire straits when Putin took office (1998 Russian financial crises). It can be argued that the economy now is in better shape than it was before Putin took over from an alcoholic. “I don’t think this will save Putin or his current ideation of Russia. “ As far as I know, Putin was extremely popular when he was president and he is still now pretty popular. State ownership of television stations may help with this. The United Russia party (of which Putin is the chairman) won the last elections in 2007 by an almost 2 3rds majority.