We're better than a Yugo!

The Gaidar Forum in Moscow exercises bragging rights;

Angel Gurria, the head of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, saw the broader economic situation as an engine of growth with four cylinders.

"I should say that this is a European car, because if it were an American car it would have eight cylinders, and it would be sucking a lot of gasoline, so this is only four cylinders, it is European," Gurria said.

The cylinders in his metaphor represent investment, trade, credit and the emerging economies, and they "are not working at full speed," he added.

Nor have air conditioning, power windows and brakes, leather seats, megawatt sound systems, GPS...

But they have the Jeffrey Sachs' seal of approval;

 "There is no great crisis here. The unemployment rate, budget deficit and poverty rate [Russia] has, the U.S. would happily trade for," said Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, at a panel session.Russia's per capita income, a measurement of purchasing power, is in the range of $20,000 to $24,000 dollars, which exceeds that of China's by more than two times, he said. 

Just don't try to swap cars with Americans.