Putin's Economic Team Plays Houdini
Mar 27, 2015 3:25 PM EDT
By Leonid Bershidsky
Last week, the Russian central bank's currency reserves increased for the first time since last July, showing that the economy may have moved past the panic caused by last year's oil price slump. Perhaps Russia's improving indicators will convince Western governments that economic sanctions are having no discernible effect and that President Vladimir Putin's regime and the country it runs aren't facing imminent collapse.
Russia has lost a little more than a quarter of its foreign reserves since mid-July 2014:
The decline was particularly sharp last December, as the central bank frantically sought a way to stop the ruble from losing value against the dollar. The much gentler slope on the chart -- beginning in January -- says more about the structure of Russia's foreign reserves than about chronic depletion.
In January 2014, Russia held $131.8 billion of U.S. debt. As its relationship with the U.S. deteriorated after the revolution in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea, Russia began shrinking its dollar reserves and increasing the share of euros and gold. While the reserves as a whole dropped 23.9 percent in 2014, the holdings of U.S. debt fell 37.6 percent, to $82.2 billion. Russia now holds less U.S. Treasury securities than Ireland, Turkey or Singapore.
The total value of foreign reserves is expressed in dollars, so Russia's euro-heavy stockpile took a hit from the dollar's rapid appreciation against the euro this year. The central bank no longer had to prop up the ruble with big foreign exchange sales: The currency has been doing OK so far this year, partly because oil has bounced back from January lows, and partly because Russia, with an interest rate of 17 percent at the beginning of the year and 14 percent now, became an attractive, though risky, carry trade destination. A glance at the relationship between the ruble and the price of Brent crude shows that the currency is now doing better than the oil benchmark -- that's a sign that the carry trade, in which speculators borrow in dollars and lend in rubles, is pushing it upward:
more...
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-03-27/putin-s-economic-team-plays-houdini
