Signs of a Russian Thaw (Toward Business)

And business was good. A year earlier, Mr. Telkov, who has tightly cropped brown hair and the shoulders of a hockey player, traveled to Guangzhou, on China’s southern coast — he speaks Mandarin, along with Arabic and English — to attend a trade show and meet with local fabric manufacturers. He negotiated a production contract on the spot. By cutting out the middlemen, Mr. Telkov was able to sell fabric for less than half the price charged by his more-established Russian competitors: around $5 per linear meter, as opposed to $12. In less than a year, Mr. Telkov had recouped his start-up capital of around $1 million and had a fleet of trucks, three warehouses and 18 employees. “I saw no limits to how big it could get,” said Mr. Telkov, now 33.

That May morning, not long after Mr. Telkov got to his warehouse, a convoy of speeding cars pulled up. Out came 10 police officers, some carrying automatic weapons. The officers told Mr. Telkov that he was under suspicion of copyright violations and that they would have to confiscate some of his goods as evidence.

Other men in plain clothes walked around and pointed to rolls of fabric: Take this, take that. The search lasted the whole day and continued into the next. In the end, the police carried away 527 rolls of fabric. Mr. Telkov was confused, not to mention panicked: a big furniture exhibition in Moscow was two days away, and he had just lost 80 percent of his inventory. He went from one government office to another, as he put it, “knocking on doors and saying, ‘Guys, you stole my goods, where are they?’ ” He got no answers.

Two months later, in July, investigators officially charged Mr. Telkov with copyright infringement. The indictment cites designs for five styles of fabric that Mr. Telkov had supposedly stolen; among them was a leopard-print pattern, as well as one that resembled a slab of marble. It was funny, absurd even, but it was also uncomfortably serious. If found guilty, Mr. Telkov could spend up to six years in prison.

Some 100,000 Russian businesspeople are either in prison or have been subject to criminal prosecution. Among the most famous is Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the former head of the Yukos oil company, who had been in prison for more than a decade until he was unexpectedly released this month by President Vladimir V. Putin. The pardon, coming as it did on the cusp of the Winter Olympics to be held in Sochi, Russia, was viewed more as a political expedient than as a harbinger of reform.

Mr. Telkov says that in his situation, investigators seemed more interested in pressuring him to plead guilty than in building a case; he says he was promised a suspended sentence, in which he would avoid prison but lose his confiscated goods. That’s how Russian businesspeople who find themselves in the middle of such cases often choose to plead. But Mr. Telkov was, simply put, a nuisance, filing requests and demanding to see the fabric that had been taken from him. If someone wanted to intimidate him or wear him down, it wasn’t working.

Finally, in January, at the request of investigators, a judge ordered Mr. Telkov arrested and held in pretrial detention. He was put into a cell with 10 other men, most of whom were facing drug charges. As Mr. Telkov remembers, investigators suggested that it was his own fault — if he would only make a deal, he could go home.

Weeks passed, then months. Mr. Telkov’s wife, Adilya, said she was sure that the court would see the absurdity of the case and release her husband. “At first I was absolutely certain that if not at this hearing, then the next one. If not there, then one more,” she said. After a few months, though, she said she “stopped being naïve.”

A Well-Placed Advocate

When Boris Titov heard about Mr. Telkov’s case, it struck him as a clear reminder of why his job is necessary. Mr. Titov, who holds the official title of presidential commissioner for entrepreneurs’ rights, was appointed to his position — which reports directly to Mr. Putin — in June 2012. Fighting corruption and easing the way for business are among the main priorities, at least in rhetoric, of Mr. Putin’s current economic agenda. After years of oil-fueled growth and rising consumption, the economy is slowing, with growth in gross domestic product falling to just over 1 percent. Kremlin officials hope that an improved climate for small business will help save the country from a prolonged period of stagnation, thus preserving social and political stability.

Unemployment in Europe Stays High Amid Signs of Recovery

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The Haggler: Seeking Vital Signs in a Lifetime Warranty

Nobody actually uses the words “blah, blah, blah,” by the way. That would be silly. But not as silly as asking the Haggler to intervene when a warranty has expired. That is very silly. If you, dear consumer, agree that your TV — or computer or dishwasher or whatever — is covered for three years, please do not get in touch four years after the purchase.

A product is either covered or not. And if it has a lifetime warranty, it most likely is covered. Unless, for some strange reason, it’s not.

Q. The waterproof lining on the inside of a backpack made by a company called Eagle Creek became sticky. The company offers lifetime warranties on workmanship and materials — the bag was bought in 1999, and used once or twice a year — so I e-mailed and asked for a solution or a replacement.

A customer service rep wrote back to say I was out of luck because “this stickiness is a result of the breakdown of the fabric over time.” My backpack, the rep explained, had reached the end of its life. Put another way, it had died, and a dead backpack is no longer eligible for the protections of a lifetime warranty.

Huh? When I protested, I was told that I could mail the backpack to the warranty department and hope for a different answer. I did, but that department gave me the same response.

Care to give this a shot?

MARGARET JAHRLING

Redmond, Wash.

A. The Haggler has never thought about a lifetime warranty in such literal terms. But Eagle Creek’s logic makes its own insane sense. It could be summed up as: “Enjoy our lifetime warranty. Until your product dies. Then leave us alone.”

The tricky part of analogizing between humans and inanimate objects is that it’s far easier to tell when humans have expired. What constitutes a dead backpack? What if your backpack is just, you know, asleep? Or unconscious?

That Eagle Creek thinks the list of dead-backpack symptoms includes sticky linings seems a little — what’s the right word here? — fatalistic. It’s a bit like a doctor deciding that people are goners if they catch a cold. But here is what an Eagle Creek rep named Sadie Schroeder told Ms. Jahrling, in an e-mail:

“Our warranty protects against defect for the life of the product. Our warranty department has deemed that items that are breaking down due to age have reached the end of their life and will not be covered by warranty.”

In another e-mail, Ms. Schroeder said of the sticky lining malady, “There is no real cure for it.”

Anyone know the last rites for a backpack?

The Haggler read all this and detected the potential for a conflict of interest. Eagle Creek offers a lifetime warranty and then gets to decide when its products have flatlined, which saves the company money on resuscitation efforts.

So the Haggler wrote to the company, which is based in Carlsbad, Calif., and sells a wide variety of travel pillows, money belts and luggage, all with the adventure traveler in mind. In late August, the company president, Roger Spatz, agreed to chat on the phone.

“It’s not often that we have these issues,” he said, early in the conversation. “Situations like this are a very small percentage of the total.”

Understood, said the Haggler, eager to get to specifics.

What about a seven-year-old backpack with a rusted zipper and a bad case of dropsy?

“I don’t know,” Mr. Spatz said, after a pause. “If we’re going to get into a list, I’m not the person qualified to give you an answer.”

What about a 12-year-old rolling bag with a frayed pocket and a touch of gout?

“I don’t know what to tell you there,” he said. “We’d have to take a look at it and see.”

The Haggler was going to ask about a five-year-old tote with some torn mesh and a social disease, but it seemed pointless. Mr. Spatz noted that Ms. Jahrling was offered the chance to buy any Eagle Creek product at 50 percent off, and he underscored that the company worked diligently to please its customers.

That actually rings true. The Haggler finds little negative static about Eagle Creek on the Internet. We are most likely talking here about a rare and relatively isolated incident. But to his credit, Mr. Spatz grasped that errors were made in Ms. Jahrling’s case.

“What I object to most is that she was told. ‘If you want to send your bag to the warranty department, maybe they’ll give you a different answer,’ ” he said. “I will take this opportunity to make sure that we’re having proper conversations with our customers.”

He also hinted that Eagle Creek was willing to do more for Ms. Jahrling. “We’re going to go back and take care of this situation,” he said.

The Haggler ended that conversation heartened and anticipating an e-mail from Ms. Jahrling with some good news. But that was more than three weeks ago and as of Friday, no one from Eagle Creek had been in touch with her. Maybe the company isn’t quite as customer-
focused as it believes. Or maybe its phone and e-mail systems are currently in the hospital.

E-mail: haggler@nytimes.com. Keep it brief and family-friendly, include your hometown and go easy on the caps-lock key. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

Few Signs of a Taste for Diet Pills

But the first new prescription weight-loss drug to reach the market in 13 years is having a hard time winning even a tiny slice of that huge market, despite an apparent need.

Sales of the drug, Qsymia (pronounced Qyoo-sim-EE-ah), have been minuscule since it went on sale last September. Sales totaled only $4.1 million in the first quarter of this year, even as Vivus, the manufacturer, spent $45 million on marketing, sales and administrative expenses.

Vivus’s stock price has plunged to $12.41 from $29 on the day after Qsymia was approved last July. And the company’s largest shareholder, saying the drug’s introduction was horribly botched, is battling to oust the entire board and top management at Vivus’s annual shareholder meeting on July 15.

More than a corporate drama, however, the slow start of Qsymia raises questions about what role prescription drugs really can play in combating the nation’s epidemic of obesity.

While there are some problems unique to Qsymia, it is also facing barriers that are likely to confront other weight-loss drugs as well, including Belviq, a drug from Arena Pharmaceuticals and Eisai, that went on sale last month. Another drug, Contrave from Orexigen Therapeutics, is in advanced clinical trials.

These obstacles include lack of insurance reimbursement, modest weight loss, safety concerns, the troubled history of diet drugs, and a feeling on the part of many doctors and obese people themselves that excess weight is a lifestyle issue best addressed by more willpower, rather than a disease that requires medical treatment.

“You’ve got this turning of the battleship to change how the medical community views obesity,” said Dr. Barbara Troupin, vice president for scientific communications and risk management at Vivus.

The attitude is turning at least a little. Last month, the American Medical Association, the nation’s largest group of doctors, declared obesity a disease. In April, the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists included weight-loss drugs in its treatment guidelines for obese patients with diabetes or at high risk of getting it.

Given that one-third of American adults are obese and another third merely overweight, an effective and safe diet pill would seem like the path to instant riches. Jack Lief, the chief executive of Arena Pharmaceuticals, said in 2009 that sales of obesity drugs could eclipse those of statins, the cholesterol-lowering pills like Pfizer’s Lipitor, which had annual sales exceeding $13 billion before falling to generic competition.

Yet no prescription drug for obesity has ever reached annual sales of even $1 billion, the lower boundary of what the pharmaceutical industry considers a blockbuster.

While an estimated two million people take weight-loss drugs, the vast majority using the old generic appetite-suppressor phentermine, that is still only a tiny fraction of the 70 million or more obese adults.

And patients typically give up on the drugs quickly. An analysis of prescription data by the Food and Drug Administration found that only one quarter of people kept using a drug for at least three months, and only 10 percent for at least 180 days.

One reason is that many people don’t lose much weight. The clinical trials showed that those taking the medium dose of Qysmia lost an average of 8.4 percent of their weight after a year. At that rate, a 250-pound person would end up at 229 pounds.

Some people can do better than average, however. Marty McNamara, who started taking Qsymia in November, said he had dropped from 424 to 332 pounds as his appetite has virtually disappeared. Mr. McNamara, a 6-foot 5-inch highway maintenance worker from Ridgecrest, Calif., said he now eats only fruit for lunch.

“It’s amazing, because I like food,” he said, but quickly corrected himself. “I used to like food.”

At Paris Show, Some Signs of Renewed Demand for Big Jets

Francois Mori/Associated PressA British Airways Airbus A380 on display at the Paris Air Show on Monday.

LE BOURGET, France — After several years of intense demand for smaller, single-aisle workhorses, the European plane maker Airbus on Monday secured a customer for its twin-deck A380 superjumbo jet, in a deal the company hoped would signal a revival in interest in larger passenger jets.

CNBC: Sneak Peak At Paris Air Show Airbus’s sales chief, John Leahy, near right, and Doric Asset Finance’s chief, Mark Lapidus, announced a deal for 20 of Airbus’s A380 superjumbo jets, worth $8.1 billion at list prices.

The agreement with a little-known German leasing company, Doric Asset Finance, was for 20 planes, and was valued at $8.1 billion at list prices. Doric was Airbus’s first customer for its superjumbo plane, which typically seats around 525 passengers.

The order came on the opening day of the Paris Air Show amid a flurry of announcements of orders for wide-body planes made by Airbus’s American rival, Boeing, including a planned stretch model of its flagship 787 Dreamliner and a long-range version of its popular 777 jet.

Airbus has struggled to garner new orders for the A380, which entered commercial service in 2007, after a series of development snags. Airbus, which has sold 282 of the planes, has said it hopes to deliver 750 over the 25-year superjumbo program. Currently, nine airlines operate just over 100 of the planes.

The A380 has been a particularly tough sell to leasing companies because airlines have tended to seek extensive and costly customization of its interior to differentiate themselves from competitors. Such work can be an onerous proposition for lessors, which often roll a plane over to different airlines during its lifetime. Two years ago, International Lease Finance Corporation, one of the world’s largest aircraft lessors, dropped plans to buy 10 superjumbos as the global economic slowdown drove airlines to rein in seat capacity.

But Doric, which is based in Offenbach, near Frankfurt, said on Monday that it was talking with several potential customers for the A380 jets.

“We see how airlines that do not yet have the A380 are interested in it and approach us and ask questions, which shows us that there is pent-up demand for this aircraft,” said Mark Lapidus, Doric’s chief executive. He said he expected his company would easily place the planes with two or three airlines.

“If anything, we are perhaps under-ordering” the A380, he said.

Another leasing company, GE Capital Aviation Services, planned to order up to 10 models of a stretch version of Boeing’s 787, which the American manufacturer was expected to commit to building this week. The larger 787 is expected to seat 320 passengers, compared with the 210 to 290 seats in the Dreamliners currently in production.

Analysts said they were skeptical about a fundamental change in the market for planes with more than 400 seats, like the A380 and Boeing 747.

“Long term, the financial future for the A380 looks pretty weak,” said Saj Ahmad, chief analyst for StrategicAero Research in London. “It’s a very small niche market.”

Despite the dearth of recent A380 orders, “the basics haven’t changed,” said Christopher Emerson, Airbus’s senior vice president for marketing. He attributed the slower-than-expected uptake of A380s to bad timing, noting that the first deliveries came less than a year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which set off the global financial crisis and subsequent recession.

“Now that we are coming out of the downturn, you will start to see traffic growing faster,” Mr. Emerson said. “Now is the time for the A380 to do what it was designed to do: capture growth.”

Economic View: Five Positive Economic Signs Are on the Horizon

The case for optimism is hardly open-and-shut. The economy’s problems include high unemployment, mediocre productivity gains and stagnant or slow-growing earnings for most income classes. Still, let’s consider five indicators that the future is starting to brighten:

MORE DIPLOMAS The nation’s high school graduation rate has risen — to 78 percent in 2010, the Education Department says in its most recent estimate. That’s obviously still not where it should be, but it’s the highest figure since 1974. (For a long time, the rate was under 70 percent. After decades of stagnation, the graduation rate started to turn up in 2000, and the growth has been robust for more than a decade.)

On average, these additional high school graduates — not to mention college degree recipients — will find better jobs and enjoy better health, long-lasting benefits that will be reaped for many decades.

NEW KNOWLEDGE, LESS COST When it comes to education, an even greater productivity gain may be on the way. This month, for instance, the Georgia Institute of Technology announced a new online master’s degree in computer science, for a price of no more than $7,000.

It’s part of a trend toward less expensive education and certification. The examples are numerous: the Khan Academy offers free online instruction in mathematics and other topics, and Coursera and other companies have popularized online courses for millions of users.

How far these trends can be pushed is unclear, but it can no longer be argued that the basic technologies of education haven’t changed in decades or even centuries.

LOWER HEALTH CARE INFLATION The growth rate in health care costs has been slowing for the last four years. In some years, in fact, it’s been no higher than the growth rate of the economy as a whole. And much of the change appears driven by efficiencies, rather than by the recent recession. This is documented in a paper by David M. Cutler, an economics professor at Harvard, and Nikhil R. Sahni, a fellow at Harvard Business School; it appeared in the May 2013 issue of Health Affairs.

This cost deceleration isn’t guaranteed to stick, but the danger that sharply rising health care costs, compounding over time, will crash the entire economy is now somewhat reduced.

POWERING AMERICA FOR LESS We appear to be at the start of a new era of cheap energy. Through advances in both oil and natural gas production, the United States is again becoming a leading exporter of fossil fuels.

Many of the nation’s economic troubles, like slow productivity and  income growth, began about the same time that America’s first age of cheap energy came to a sudden end, in the early 1970s. The effect of today’s energy boom on broader productivity remains to be seen, but it could prove a source of further gains. Unfortunately, cheap natural gas isn’t the path toward sustainable green energy, although it is cleaner than coal and has helped the nation make some progress in reducing emissions.

MOBILIZING THE CREATIVE This final development, concerning the fate of talent in lesser-developed nations, is perhaps the most fundamental. If you were born a genius in Shanghai in 1960, for example, your chances of making much contribution to the larger world were small, because China was largely isolated back then — and extremely unfree economically. It now does a much better job of mobilizing its considerable natural talent.

While the populations of countries like the United States are aging, the number of innovative young people worldwide has never been higher. Countries like China, India, Brazil and Russia, despite recent slowdowns in growth, still are making progress in improving their educational systems and scientific networks. That increases their ability to supply technological innovations — or scientists and entrepreneurs — to the United States. These gains can be reaped in coming decades.

Note, too, that none of these trends can be reduced to breathless or utopian claims about the future of information technology, even though each is intertwined with tech progress in subtle ways. Further breakthroughs in technology, perhaps in the field of quantum computing, could add substantially to these positive trends.

The first decade of this century was largely a lost one, economically speaking, for the average American household. And in the beginning of this decade, median household income has actually dropped, during a time of ostensible economic recovery. Yet the longer-run picture, finally, can be given a partly optimistic gloss. These trends may not ultimately be the dominant ones, but if we’re looking for a positive narrative about the American economic future, some important pieces are starting to fall into place.

DealBook: European Banks Show Signs of Health

4:55 p.m. | Updated

Despite persistent unemployment, malaise and continuing debt problems, one sector in Europe seems to be benefiting: European banks.

After years of painful job cuts and moves to make portfolios less risky, several large European institutions reported strong first-quarter results in recent days, helped by cost-cutting and better performance of major units.

On Tuesday, the Swiss bank UBS and the Lloyds Banking Group of Britain surprised investors by reporting better than expected earnings for the first quarter, sending shares of both banks up.

The British banks Royal Bank of Scotland and HSBC, along with the French bank BNP Paribas, are among those still scheduled to report first-quarter figures in the coming days. But so far, the first-quarter results paint a somewhat encouraging picture of banks that have managed to limit losses from bad loans linked to the credit crisis, while reducing costs and returning to their core banking operations: credit and mortgages for some and wealth management for others.

UBS, for instance, reported on Tuesday a first-quarter profit of 988 million Swiss francs ($1 billion). Those results were down slightly from 1 billion francs in the period a year earlier, but far exceeded the 412 million francs predicted by analysts surveyed by Bloomberg News. Shares of UBS soared 5.67 percent in trading in Zurich on Tuesday.

Sergio P. Ermotti, the chief executive, cautioned that it was “too early to declare victory,” but said the earnings showed the company’s “business model works in practice.”

Some investors note that the continuing difficulties in the euro zone and weak demand for loans mean that many European banks remain in trouble despite relatively good earnings in the first quarter.

“They are doing their utmost to have a decent banking model and the numbers across the board were very good, but going forward we now have the issue of where the growth is going to come from,” said Florian Esterer, a fund manager at the MainFirst Group in Zurich.

Still, European banks are moving actively to address their problems, including by slashing costs in the face of changing regulations and a sluggish European economy. Deutsche Bank reported on Monday after the markets closed that its first-quarter profit rose as cost-cutting offset a decline in revenue from investment banking. Deutsche Bank’s stock also rose 4.7 percent in Frankfurt on Tuesday on the news that it would issue new shares to bolster its capital reserves.

“There are still some headwinds, but banks are pretty much there when it comes to reaching the right level of capital and that is helpful,” said Cormac Leech, an analyst at Liberum Capital.

UBS has been eliminating 10,000 jobs, reducing bonus payments, scaling back its investment banking trading business and focusing more on its successful wealth management operation. Those steps helped the bank’s first-quarter results.

UBS, its Swiss rival Credit Suisse, and Barclays of Britain all benefited from higher revenue at its investment banking operation. At Credit Suisse, pretax profit in its investment banking division rose 43 percent, the bank said last week. Barclays, which also reported earnings last Wednesday, said pretax profit for its investment bank rose 11 percent in the quarter.

Reducing costs and shedding assets also helped Lloyds report a first-quarter net profit of £1.5 billion ($2.3 billion). Those results were a sharp turnaround from the £5 million loss Lloyds posted in the first quarter of 2012.

Analysts say European banks are also starting to recover from the fallout from numerous financial scandals that have hurt their reputations.

UBS, for example, has sought to rebuild trust among clients after it uncovered a $2.3 billion trading loss in 2011 connected with the activities of a former trader, Kweku M. Adoboli, who has since been sentenced to seven years in jail. In December, UBS said it would pay $1.5 billion in fines to settle a case related to the manipulation of the London interbank offered rate, or Libor.

Many of the other large European banks have also been ensnared in the rate-rigging scandal. Deutsche Bank has set aside 2.4 billion euros ($3.2 billion) to cover the potential cost of proceedings that include a tax evasion inquiry in Germany and an international investigation into accusations that its employees and those at other investment banks colluded to fix benchmark interest rates.

While financial institutions will continue to address such issues, there is a cautious optimism now about bank performance.

“There is a new appetite for banks among investors. There’s a confidence that wasn’t there two years ago,” Mr. Leech said.

Jack Ewing contributed reporting.