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This article focuses on the financial condition of Russia, involving the impact of elections on the economic reform of this nation, as of September 1995. During the last 12 months, the monthly inflation remains dangerously dose to double figures, private investment is minuscule and there are infiltrating gaps in basic legislation. Moreover, the country this year has gone through an expectations switch-back. But these changes in sentiment fail to take account of the important fact that, over the past year the irreversibility of Russia's reforms has become certain. The weight of power is no longer among those sectors interested in increasing government control, such as, the military, industrial complex and the security-intelligence forces. Control is now firmly held by the fuel and energy lobby and the emerging financial elite. The former are broadly pro-market, the latter unanimously so. Companies involved in these sectors have accumulated great wealth over the past three years, and will do everything necessary to ensure that hands-off government prevails.

In this article the author discusses the Farepak scandal that took place in Great Britain in 2006. Farepak, an organization that distributes holiday gifts and vouchers to its subscribers at Christmas, entered bankruptcy protection, thus threatening the holidays of its members. As it is not a financial institution Farepak is not required to make restitution to subscribers and the firm's bankers are making only half-hearted efforts at repayment.

This article reports on the protests that will be made by the grandchildren of pensioners in the United Kingdom. The protest has been organized by the Pensions Action Group, after 100,000 retirees lost their pensions. The author argues that the government should pay the pensioners because of the confusing and incorrect literature provided by the Treasury Department and that the pension system was weakened by actions taken by the department and by Chancellor Gordon Brown.

Comments on Great Britain Chancellor Gordon Brown's plans to expand the role of the Britain's Department of Treasury. Suspicions that Brown has a medium-term plan to break up the Department of Social Security; Brown's efforts to set interest rates to the Bank of England; Praise received by Britain's model central banking.

Hails the decision of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England to raise interest rates. Economic indicators that support the bank's decision to hike interest rates; Advantage of the rate hikes for Great Britain's government; Projected decrease of interest rates by the next elections; Inflation-induced benefit savings realized from raising interest hikes.

Focuses on the human cost of North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Balkan campaign. Financial implications; Cost of each cruise missile fired; Cost of the air strikes.

This article reports on the rise in the value of rouble (R), the Russian currency. Explaining movements in national currencies is more of an art than a science at the best of times. But in the hurly-burly of pre-election Russia, the rouble has become as much a political as an economic animal. Analysts have done better ignoring the underlying fundamentals altogether in recent weeks. From an all-time low of R 5,130 to the dollar at the end of April 1995, the rouble had risen 12% by June. In fact, Russia's real exchange rate the nominal figure adjusted for inflation, has been quietly appreciating since last October's crash. For the four months between then and February, the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) bought roubles on the Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange. By limiting the nominal decline to a rate just less than inflation, acting central bank governor Tatyana Paramonova had returned to the CBR's precrash policy of maintaining a stable, but slightly-appreciating real exchange rate.