OREANDA-NEWS. June 25, 2012. Renaissance Capital, the leading emerging markets investment bank, opened its 16th Annual Investor Conference, bringing together over 1,000 investors and 100 companies for the largest independent investor event in Russia and the CIS.

The two-day conference covers a wide range of issues related to the economic potential of emerging markets. Conference attendees include institutional and corporate investors, as well as Russian and international representatives from the public sector and the business elite.

The conference is devoted to one-on-one meetings. Industry analysts from Renaissance Capital are meeting with investors and the representatives of companies from Russia, the CIS, Asia and Africa to share their professional assessment of investment prospects in different regions of the world.

“For most Western economies, the current crisis has had a bigger impact on economic output than any other in modern history,” Stephen Jennings, CEO of Renaissance Capital, said in his opening remarks. “And the recovery is more delayed than any other, because of the toxic combination of debt, excessive government, poor demographics and weak leadership. Absent radical change, the medium-to-long-term outlook is dire. While growth may have slowed in some emerging markets, the challenges facing the world’s fast-growing economies are trivial in comparison with those in the West.”

The conference also includes speeches by Russia's former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, as well as Ruben Aganbegyan, President of the MICEX-RTS stock exchange. The opening panel of the conference is being moderated by Fareed Zakaria, Host of CNN’s GPS and Editor-at-large of Time magazine, and includes Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich; Paul Collier, the Oxford University economist; Lucio Vinhas de Souza, chief economist at Moody's; Daniel Triesman, professor of political science at the University of California; and Charles Robertson, Renaissance Capital's Global Chief Economist.