We have numerously mentioned that an impression is created that our government is doing its best to get as much money as possible. They are following the logic by which they wish to have money and only then think about the rest. If in other counties wise people sit down with economist, financiers and try figure out ways and elaborate programs on how to overcome the global crisis, afterwards they discuss this program, receive the consent of the parliamentarians and make a final decision; in our country through the situation is totally different. In our country they first want money (the more the better) and once they receive money they start to think about what they are going to do with this money. This was clearly seen in the last session of the government. During that session Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan clearly said, “We have an opportunity to dig out financial means but unfortunately at the moment we don’t have decent projects to submit to international foundations.” I mean the anti-crisis foundation formed in the framework of Eurazes, where there is about 10 billion USD. It means money is there and they are willing to give away the money but there is no ground to submit a program. More accurately to say they need concrete programs. Can you imagine in what state the government is. They are panicking to get the money before anybody else grabs the millions. “We should be able to benefit from this unique opportunity and the sooner this happens the better,” said the Prime Minister and added that a working group was established led by the deputy-minister of finances. The working group should cooperate with all the ministries and state bodies in order to elaborate major projects necessary for Armenia and attractive to international bodies to provide money. As a matter of fact the government has mobilized its resources to attain money from abroad. We are trying to get as much money as possible and regardless of who the money-giver is. During the same session the Prime Minister also complained about extra criticism by calling it unconstructive. As a possible example he mentioned two media sources. However, the objective of the media is not to submit practical suggestions. The media must understand what the government is doing and present all that in a comprehensive way to the society. In this case, how can the government publicize information which the government doesn’t understand? For example, the Armenian journalists know that the US President Barack Obama presented to the Congress a project which costs billions of dollars. But in our case, has there been any serious analysis to at least approximately assess how much we need to heal our economy? We don’t know that. In general the government is taking approximately 2 billion USD (545 million from the WB, 500 million from Russia and 822 million from IMF). And we still wish to take more. Moreover, we don’t know what the condition of the Eurazes loan is. Let us also mention that the owner of 7.5 million out of 10 billion is going to go to Russia. This is almost the same as borrowing money from Russia (which as the previous practice shows is not quite fun). As the Russian President D. Medvedev mentioned the loans of Eurazes must be given to member states to resolve their long-term goals. And the credit conditions should be the same as for international financial organizations. Perhaps there is no need to involve more means and perhaps a part of what has been taken wasn’t worth. We know that such opinions are unserious and unconstructive for the government but on the other hand these opinions have the right to exist because there is no realistic program on how to save the economy and neither is there normal information on that. It seems that everything is being done “homely” depending on how much money the government can “grab.” In the meantime the use and application of the already taken credits causes lots of doubts. And this can also be stipulated by the fact that ever since the previous government they were trying to convince the society that the term Earthquake Zone is already gone but now they are allocating 48 billion AMD (over 130 million USD) to the recovery of the Earthquake Zone. Or the government is giving loans to mining companies, which have worked with great profits in many years. So this money is given from the state budget but nothing is clearly mentioned about the interest rates. Nevertheless, let us mention that the government is not inventing a bike and it takes all the steps that all the other countries have already taken to revive their economies. But the long-run steps of the government remain unclear. Many people insist that Armenia is going to appear in a worse shape due to the taken loans. Others oppose this opinion by saying that this debt is in allowable limits. So we won’t have problems when retrieving those loans. They bring up international criteria applied for other countries by noting that in this case the foreign debt doesn’t exceed 50% of the GDP. But there is one nuance. We are very different from others because when others are saying economy or GDP they first of all understand it as industry, competitive products, growing export, etc. And we when speaking of GDP growth think about construction rates and increase of the price of metals. We don’t create any valuable and competitive product to export outside so that we could acquit the foreign loans more easily. Roughly said, this resembles a behavior of a person, who got used to living at the expense of the money sent by a relative living abroad but now he has problems and needs to borrow money from a Russian Fedia, who he served with in the army. But instead of investing this money in any business he builds a bench in the yard to play backgammon with the friends. Maybe the money will be enough to invite a couple of friends to his place and treat them beer and lobster. What’s next? If the business of the relative living in a foreign country improves, he will still receive money from him without any goal in his life and always depending on somebody. And if suddenly the friend’s business doesn’t improve he will have nothing else to do. Neither can he call the Russian friend and give the bench to him because Fedia doesn’t know how to play backgammon. Fedia knows many ways how to get his money back regardless if the man is his army friend or business parent (even strategic partner).
