Balcerowicz - PO trojan horse in Ukrainian government

Leszek Balcerowicz has become an official reprensentative of the Ukiainian government, President Poroshenko announced today. Balcerowicz's shock therapy of the early 1990s, which slashed Poles' buying power overnight, did put an end to run-away inflation (if I recall about $1 = 18.000 ZŁ). At the same time he sold off Polsih industry for a song and turned Poland into a neo-colonial client state of foreign intererst groups to exploit cheap manpower and assembly sites rather than working to create an indigenously Polish industrial infrastructure. Hopefully, he won't be given that much free rein in Kyiv or what's left of Ukrainian industry will soon disappear.

If Balcerowicz didn't do that in Poland and if it were Ukraine which had their own Balcerowicz at that time, we might have been in a position to borrow their "Balcerowicz" from them in 2016.

Unfortunately enough, they didn't have a Balcerowicz in the year 1990.

But he stripped Poland of her industruial assets so that today poor Morawiecki has little to build on.

They were doing so wonderfully well at the time, yea, he was stupid to sell off state-sponsored crap that was hemorrhaging money daily.
What an idiot

Nationalised industry is usually a very bad idea and yes, he did very much the right thing.

Extremism will get you nowhere. There was no attempt to revitalise the more promsiing industries, not all were total crap. There was no massive entrepreneurship training programme to create an indigenous Polish business class, no attempts to promote joint ventrues with foreign partners where Polish entreprenurs would retain the controlling stake. Above all, there was no attempt to create a mixed state-private Polish Capital Consortium which could have bought some of the privatised works. The consortium's assets could have inlcuded KGHM, refineries, shipyards, collieries, Cegielski, FSO, FSC, etc. (you surely don't claim that all that was worthless). Polish private investors should have been given incentives (cheap credit, tax breaks) to join the project and foreign business trainers could have been brought in. Had Balcerowicz opted for such a plan, Poland's industrial base would be a far cry from today's neo-colonial cheap manpower and assembly-plant country.

moved from


I respect him. He was honest. He said outright it will be hard but he believes it's necessary.

Exactly.

History books will one day recognise him as one of the greatest economists of modern Europe.

The sad thing is, as is often the case with us Poles, that he is respected more abroad than in Poland

I think so too. Those who think otherwise are the ones who believe in the fairytale that the Polish economy was thriving in 1989.

Of course, not all were total crap. Only 90% of them. 10% was promising.


Probably not, coz he only implemented what other foreign economists had invented long before. But he will be mentioned in Polish history books as the one who dared to take the risk and transform communist system into capitalist. It had never been done before so he made a few mistakes, which were painful to some groups, e.g., PGR state farm workers. But the final result was very positive.