Prominent economist Joseph Stiglitz ties all these ideas together to explain the reason why shock therapy failed in Russia. Through the idea of property rights, Stiglitz uses the idea of Adam Smith's invisible hand to explain that, in the presence of severe corruption, a lack of institutionalized law and order and artificially depressed exchange rates, the free market created by shock therapy in Russia created a race to the bottom to asset strip the country and remove the capital abroad, rather than the mutually beneficial race to control the market in commodities that would otherwise happen. Competition meant that if the nominal owner of the capital didn't asset strip the capital first, someone else would. Likewise, with the previously large Soviet nationalised industries being privatised quickly created a situation where major markets operated in a monopoly owned by a few individuals (the Russian oligarchs) who had links with the government of Boris Yeltsin.