WHO IS SHOCKED THAT ILLIBERAL REGIMES ARE WEAK?:

Collapsing the Russian economy is turning out to be much easier than anybody guessed.

Last week the ruble and the Moscow stock market were in free fall. Fortune called it "the fifth-worst plunge in equity market history," meaning not in the history of Russia's equity market but in the history of 90 equity markets around the world that are monitored by Bloomberg. Meanwhile, the ruble fell to 89.60 to the dollar, its lowest foreign-exchange rate in history. In a scene straight out of the Great Depression, Russians raced to their ATMs to pull out what cash they could.

All that happened before the United States, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, Italy, and the European Union announced on Saturday that they were imposing sweeping restrictions on Russia's central bank, disrupting its efforts to end the bank runs through stepped-up lending from its $600 billion in reserves. On Monday, the ruble fell further by nearly one-third, the central bank jacked up interest rates to 20 percent, and the Moscow stock market closed. Wrecking the Russian economy, it turns out, is like blowing on a dandelion.

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