A small price to pay for the interior view. Our conversation made me see, with much greater clarity, the economic truths of today's Russia. The law and the courts are not relevant to the economy. They don't worry about profits, because taxes add up to more than 100 percent of profits, so anyone actually taking home money has to be cheating on taxes. They have to be alert to Mafia infiltration of their staff.
Mafias control internal distribution of goods.
Unless a company owns its own retail outlets, wholesalers bring their trucks to a Mafia marketplace, where retailers come to buy goods off the trucks. The Mafia takes a cut from both sides. Courts, the mechanism used in the West, take too long to deal with bad debts and have no power to enforce decisions, so the only way to collect is to strong-arm the retailer. That, at least, is one way to look at the new Russian economy, in which black is white and vice versa. The bank where I generally get my rubles seems to have run out of big bills, and medium-denomination notes as well.