Рецессия, Кризис, Дағдарыс (Economic Crisis)

From your friendly correspondent in Almaty:

I can say that prices in Almaty have changed since the last time I was here two years ago, and according to local friends, things have changed more or less steadily.  The fall of the tenge back in spring still looms relatively large in public memory.  For a few lucky individuals in the employ of American companies [and paid in dollars exchanged into tenge] this has been great.  For the rest, they’ve seen the buying power of their currency drop.  Holding steady at roughly 150 tenge to the dollar, the tenge’s recent weakness comes up more with the rarer, big purchases: cars, computers, houses, businesses.

What’s more, statistics are easy to find, but difficult to parse.  The general story is taken from the Russian press: the crisis is the fault of American and Western companies’ greed, and Kazakhstan and other republics are passive victims waiting for the economic atmosphere to clear up.  That being said, credit is still being advertised actively – one commercial offered a “low, low” 12.5% interest rate on home mortgage loans.  I am not the expert on banking in America or in Kazakhstan, but let it be said simply that banks are very different creatures in the two countries.  While Americans might feel wronged by the irresponsible actions of their bankers, the average Kazakhstani businessman might not understand why we ever trusted the banks in the first place.

I’m hoping to write some more about life in Almaty as the summer wears on.  So far, it is as leafy and pleasant as I remember it, and still remains one of the least ‘Central Asian’ of the cities I have seen in Central Asia, however you want to interpret that.

This post was written by...

Michael Hancock-Parmer – author of 153 posts on Registan.net.

Michael earned an MA in Central Eurasian Studies in 2011 and remains a student at Indiana University pursuing a dual PhD in Russian History and Central Eurasian Studies. He served 6 months in the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan in 2005. After the events in Andijan and the subsequent closure of the program, he served 2 years in southern Kazakhstan, returning to the Midwest in 2007. His general area of interest is on post-Timur Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, centered on the Syr Darya river valley.