HBS Student Challenges Guest Speaker

What began as a private e-mail exchange between a Harvard Business School (HBS) student and an investment tycoon inadvertently turned into a highly publicized and personal debate over the Russian economy.

In a talk at HBS a few weeks ago, Jim Rogers—the self-described “Indiana Jones” of fund management—shared his bleak outlook on Russia’s economic future.

In the question and answer session following the talk, Dmitry Alimov, a second-year HBS student from Russia, expressed his disagreement with Rogers’ viewpoint.

Rogers brushed off Alimov’s objections, according to other students present at the event.

“He basically called me incompetent,” Alimov wrote in an e-mail to The Crimson.

After the talk, Alimov wrote an e-mail to Rogers which further detailed his objections. Backing up his arguments with data from the World Bank and the Russian government, he asserted that Russia’s economic prospects are in fact much more promising than those which Rogers described.

Alimov also forwarded the e-mail to over 40 people at HBS and a number of other friends and associates.

In his e-mail response to Alimov’s message, Rogers called Alimov a “chauvinistic know nothing” and characterized the student’s arguments as “ludicrous canards” and “balderdash.” A second e-mail from Alimov received no response, but by that time the original e-mail exchange had been widely forwarded to an unknown number of recipients in the finance and investment world.

In addition to e-mails of support from a number of fund managers and government officials in Russia and Britain, Alimov said he has received a number of job offers from investment banks and hedge funds in Russia and the United States.

In his e-mail to The Crimson, Alimov wrote that he had no objective other than to set the record straight after being dismissed in Rogers’ talk. He said had not expected such a strong positive response to the incident.

Rogers, who said he did not think anything of the e-mail exchange , said he respected Alimov’s right to question him.

“Free expression is one of the exciting things about the world,” Rogers wrote in an e-mail to The Crimson.

He added that the incident had not changed his views on the Russian economy.

Rogers co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros and recently made headlines by breaking world records for traveling around the world on a motorbike and then in a car.

He has also published books expressing his views on the economic prospects of the countries he has traveled through and in past years has been pessimistic about Russia’s prospects—citing the nation’s declining population and recent history of economic turbulence.