Russia's Donald Trump

If you do not live in Moscow, the name, Araz Agalarov (age 51), may not be familiar to you, but you will hear it more often very soon. Mr. Agalarov, a native of Baku, Azerbaijan, is a Moscow-based real estate developer and one of the hundred richest men in Russia. Agalarov has built a number of projects which, despite some initial skepticism about their financial viability, have all gone on to exceed expectations. Agalarov's first major project in Moscow was a super high-end shopping mall called Crocus City Mall. Completed in 2002, many thought the idea of putting an elite mall along the outer ring road around Moscow was ill advised. Would wealthy Muscovites fight traffic to drive to a shopping mall to buy their Prada, Armani, Gucci? Mr. Agalarov thought so and it turns out he was correct.

Russian banks are providing more and more ‘bad' mortgage credits

As if bad consumer credit, which plagues the Russian retail banking sector were not enough, a new crisis is looming, this time on the mortgage market. Or so the experts say. Igor Kuzin, board chairman at Delta Credit bank said this week that the local mortgage market may soon experience a crisis similar to that suffered by the United States earlier this year. The U.S. mortgage crisis was a result of simplified credit conditions and mortgage loans that required no down payment, which led to an insolvency crisis. Now Kuzin says that the same may be happening in Russia. Moreover, he claims that while "consumer crediting may survive the crisis of insolvency, for the mortgage market such crisis would be systemic".

Bankers Forecast Mortgage Crisis in Russia

The mortgage crisis is threatening Russia, said Igor Kuzin, board chairman of DeltaCredit Mortgage Bank. The crisis will be similar to the one that hit the United States, and it will be caused by risky loans that the banks are giving in big numbers.

The city of Krasnodar

With Sochi now the International Olympic Committee's choice to host the 2014 Winter Olympiad, the real work of preparing Krasnodar Krai for the expected influx of capital and visitors has only just begun. To give Russia Blog's readers a better picture of the tremendous economic development now underway in the region, we have asked Timothy Post, an American businessman working in the city of Krasnodar, to share some of his insights.