From Politico:
The ruble tumbled on Wednesday to its lowest level in over two years, as a mix of low oil prices, new sanctions against Russian businesses and burgeoning government spending on its war effort put ever-greater strain on the Russian economy.
The central bank reacted by suspending currency purchases for the rest of this year. That will restrict the supply of rubles and should support the exchange rate accordingly.
The ruble has depreciated 18.2% since the beginning of the month.
Update, 12noon CT 11/28/2024:
Ruble at 108 to the dollar now.
Addendum, 6pm CT:
Interesting picture of cumulative change in the price level, from Rosstat vs Romir.
Source: Re: Russia (October 2024).
So they did a short term fix to a medium term problem
Elon Musk has become Trump’s Heinrich Himmler, leader of his SS (Protection Squadron).
Musk has begun his SS campaign of terrorism, doxing on Twitter completely innocent civil servants whose job titles he simply doesn’t like. These aren’t political people, just anonymous civil servants he knows nothing about.
An example is a woman whose title is Director of Climate Diversification. And since she has a word like “diversity” in her title, she must be part of the “woke” racism conspiracy. This is regardless of the fact that diversification in this case refers to finding diverse innovations that bolster infrastructure and agriculture against extreme weather events. But yes, Musk is that ignorant. His attack is based on diversification as a bad word.
Musk has over 200 million followers on Twitter and they are now harassing and issuing deaths threats to these civil servants Musk has doxed. It is pure intimidation and terror on behalf of his Fuhrer.
And Trump has also unleashed his SS leader on Republican senators, threatening that Musk will spend millions on opposition primaries if they don’t fall in line for his cabinet confirmations. It’s all about terror and intimidation. And Musk is the instrument.
Musk has also expressed his affinity with white nationalists and literal Nazis, retweeting their racist posts.
Musk has also tweeted his approval of eugenics and the notion that only high testosterone, high IQ males should be allowed to participate in democracy.
Musk is an evil psychopath, arguably the most dangerous person in America, even more so that Trump. He has unlimited billions at his disposal to work his deeds, and hundreds of millions of loyal brown shirt followers on his web site.
Bad times are ahead. It’s like Germany in the 1930s.
He really is the Heinrich Himmler of our time, working for the Fuhrer.
And CNN was unable to find any internet experts willing to go on the record about the dangers of Musk’s doxing because of fears of themselves becoming targets of his attacks and retaliation from his loyal brown shirts.
Terror and intimidation to enforce obedience and silence. And so it goes for Elon Himmler.
Gazprombank came under international sanctions a week ago, probably a factor in the timing of this latest ruble slide.
A notable feature of this week’s turmoil is that the Usd/Rub rates paid in Russian interbank trade diverged from those quoted outside of Russia. Similarly, a big old arbitrage gap opened up between the Usd, Rub and Cny. That is not to say the Usd/Rub rate outside Russia is misleading; the other two rates neay converged on the market rate before the central bank intervened. It’s just that Russia’s interbank market and the Rub/Cny market are so illiquid and rickety that arbitrage is tough to execute.
I vaguely recall that Menzie has informed us of the exchange rate pass-through to Russian inflation? Ah, yes:
https://econbrowser.com/archives/2022/02/russian-exchange-rate-pass-through-into-consumer-prices#:~:text=For%20Russia%2C%20it's%20maybe%2010,calculated%20in%20log%2Ddifference%20terms.
“…it’s maybe 10%-17% for 1 quarter, 50%-70% for 4 quarters.”
Yikes! Bet the Felon-in-Chief got a call from his autocratic financier buddy.