I couldn’t help thinking that Sachs wasn’t giving his audience enough credit. The people in that room were well versed in Milton Friedman’s crisis theory, and many had applied it in their own countries. Most understood perfectly how wrenching and volatile an economic meltdown could be, but they were taking a different lesson from Russia: that a painful and disorienting political situation was forcing Yeltsin to rapidly auction off the riches of the state, a distinctly favorable outcome.
