Vladimir Putin’s luck may be running out now that the ruble plunged below one cent, the lowest level against the U.S. dollar since the early days of his war in Ukraine.
Account deficit for first 6 months is like 30 billion. They entered the war with 300b pile available to them.
They used much of that to prop RUB. Between deficit, inability to raise FX on global markets and war spending they got to be starting to run out and fx markets smell it.
Still a while to go tho. Ukraine still has to spend another year or two grinding Russia down.
But Ukraine is supported by half the planet that happens to be the rich half.
Russias hope is that China will bail them out when shit hits the fan.
I just checked, it looks like they’re stealing the “smart” out of smart appliances in order to produce electronic components. So scorched earth, in the future, may involve entering your fridge’s self destruct code.
I want to laugh at how the 10¢ microcontrollers we put in dishwashers in the west are better than state-of-the-art homegrown Russian tech, but then I remember that America would be pretty screwed if we were cut off from Taiwan and had to rely on locally-manufactured chips, too. It wouldn’t be as bad since we do have some chip fabs here, but we don’t have enough of them to make the national security folks happy.
Think about the automobile shortages in the last few years due to lack of chips, except it’s military vehicles instead.
A few years ago 1 Ruble = 0.015 USD this was pretty consistent for a while. Now 1 Ruble = 0.010 USD this has fluctuated pretty wildly.
The fluctuation is far more important than the actual number. Nobody cares if 1 Ruble = $1 or $1000 as long as you can rely on it to be that next week and next year. But the fact that you have no idea how far down (or up) it will go means that people aren’t going to want to rely on holding any currency in Russia.
No one wants to hold Rubles when the entire Western world is deploying extreme sanctions against Russia, especially when the West created, dominates, and manipulates the global financial system.
Vladimir Putin’s luck may be running out now that the ruble plunged below one cent, the lowest level against the U.S. dollar since the early days of his war in Ukraine.
The Russian president, who briefly faced down a coup attempt in June, could long point to the resilience of his currency in the face of sanctions as a propaganda victory that proved just how impotent Western economic reprisals were.
More than 500 days since his army invaded Ukraine, it looks as if Moscow’s highly respected central bank governor can no longer perform miracles for her boss.
The ruble that Elvira Nabiullina manages crashed through the psychological support of 100 to the U.S. dollar and on Monday is now worth less than a penny, the first time since March 23 of last year.
“They’re laughing at us,” scathed Vladimir Solovyov, Russia’s most well-known state TV personality and a chief Putin ally, already last week.
The war hawk demanded Nabiullina explain herself to the population now that currency has lost roughly a quarter of its value against the dollar since the start of this year.
On Sunday, images were shared online of a small symbolic protest mounted in western Siberia: A building’s chyron kept repeating the message that “Putin is a dickhead and a thief,” calling the ruble’s exchange rate “crazy.”
Her institution, meanwhile, has countered by arguing a softer ruble does not present risks to the country’s financial stability. Nonetheless, Russia’s central bank decided to freeze purchases of foreign currency on the domestic market through the remainder of this year to restore faith in the sliding ruble. Russia’s currency strength handed Putin a PR victory
Following a brief collapse in the initial aftermath of last year’s Feb. 24 invasion, which saw Russia’s fiat tender plunge to a record low of 120 to the dollar, the ruble rebounded to trade at one point at highs not seen since 2015, around 50 to the dollar.
This gave the Kremlin an important PR victory by suggesting Russia’s economy was strong enough to withstand anything the West threw at it.
This in turn prompted soul-searching among Ukraine’s Western backers while bolstering critics alarmed more at the cost of soaring food and energy prices than at Russia’s empire-building.
“It’s slightly more valuable than it was on the day that Russia invaded Ukraine. The economic situation in the United States by contrast is deteriorating fast,” then Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a chief critic of U.S. aid to Kyiv, said last April.
<span style="color:#323232;">The clearest signal that Russia is losing this war? #Russia Ruble weakened beyond 100 per Dollar for 1st time in 17mth, extending a slide that threatens to stoke inflation in an economy that has been kneecapped by Western sanctions. Ruble has fallen 27% vs Dollar YTD & 23% vs… pic.twitter.com/cr763vz21E
</span><span style="color:#323232;">— Holger Zschaepitz (@Schuldensuehner) August 14, 2023
</span>
Nabiullina was celebrated for cleverly steering her financial system through the worst of the turmoil by placing a range of capital controls that quickly stabilized the currency and prevented mass outflows.
“They were a quick fix for the ruble in 2022, but are counterproductive in the long run,” wrote Janis Kluge, senior associate at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, last week.
The fresh signs of economic weakness come at an important juncture in the war. The Russian army is attempting to defend large swaths of territory seized in the early months of the invasion against a Kyiv counteroffensive boasting modern Western military equipment.
Any material losses on the battlefield could further undermine Putin’s authority, already weakened following the challenge made by Wagner mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin in June.
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Russia’s central bank decided to freeze purchases of foreign currency on the domestic market through the remainder of this year to restore faith in the sliding ruble.
You will believe in the ruble by force! lol
Their interest rate is already at 8.5%, and their talking about raising it to 15%-20%. That paired with a a labor shortage. Not only that, they halted sales of corporate shares and government bonds by foreign investors last year. This is nuts. Why would anyone want to do business with or in Russia? Russia is literally a buddy economy. If you’re buddies with the dictator, you’re good. If not, you’re fucked. An economy like that will never succeed in the long-run because it’s based on social relationships and not actual production. It’s like wtf.
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