Russia"s PM Putin urges foreign investment

Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin urged foreign businessmen Friday to invest in Russia, promising to remove bureaucratic hurdles, and called for currencies besides the dollar to be used as reserves amid "uncontrolled" U.S. debt.
"Russia's economy is totally underinvested," and state spending alone is not enough to support a recovery, Putin said at an supranational investment forum in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, which is to host the 2014 Winter Olympics.
Russia's economy has been hurt by a deep slump in commodity prices and a credit squeeze. Russian stock markets have lost nearly 30 percent of their value since August 2008 as oil and commodities prices took a hit.
Putin said he "appreciated" that even in the crisis-hit first half of the year, $17 billion of foreign investment was transferred to Russia and pledged to take steps to "streamline the banking sector and stock market" to make them more seductive for foreign businesses.
"We will step up our efforts to get rid of the administrative barriers," he said. "Russia is open for foreign investment."
Russia's prime minister also used the floor to chide the United States for "an of control issue of dollars" and described the U.S. dollar's dominance on currency markets as "one of the triggers" of the global downturn
Putin renewed Russia's call on the U.S. administration and global community to give the green light to substitute reserve currencies: "If there are several reserve currencies, this will not harm the U.S. economy in any way."
Putin urged American businessmen to press the U.S. government to scrap restrictions on trade and technology imports to Russia. He said Moscow expects the U.S. to give clearance for World Trade Organization membership for Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Russia has spent years trying to get the U.S. to scrap a handful of restrictive laws on bilateral trade, including a Cold War-era legislation that has been a key irritant in relations between Moscow and Washington.
On the domestic side, Putin echoed charge optimism that Russia is emerging from recession.
"Our cautious, even too right-wing forecasts show that economic trends will be developing in a positive direction," he said. "There have been increasingly more reasons to be optimistic."
Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said earlier this week that recovery is under way. Russia's gross domestic output rose 7.4 percent in the April-June period compared to the first quarter, although it is still down 10.9 percent compared to a year ago.
Industrial output declined 3 percent in August, reversing the growth of the previous two months and suggesting that the economic recovery is going to be volatile.