Intense selling of the ruble continued on Tuesday in a row amid pressure from the U.S. sanctions and mounting geopolitical risks that are rocking Russia’s financial markets. Bloomberg reported.
Russia’s currency plunged to the weakest level in 15 months and the government canceled a bond auction Tuesday following the toughest set of U.S. sanctions yet, announced on Friday.
The ruble dropped 3.6 percent to 62.86 versus the dollar, taking its slump this week to 7.5 percent. The Finance Ministry cited unfavorable market conditions in its first decision to scrap a debt sale since August 2015. Exporters that benefit from a weaker currency led Russia’s benchmark stock index higher after its sharpest collapse on Monday since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.
Russia’s central bank governor Elvira Nabiullina said she won’t step in to try and halt a slide in the ruble, which is facing intense selling for the second day in a row amid pressure from the U.S. sanctions and mounting geopolitical risks that are rocking Russia’s financial markets.
On April 6, April 6, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions against 38 Russian businessmen, officials and companies. Among them – the main shareholder of “Rusal” Oleg Deripaska and other businessmen from the “Kremlin list”, including Kirill Shamalov, Viktor Vekselberg and Igor Rotenberg.
The measures led to a collapse in the value of shares of many Russian companies.
However, some entrepreneurs took such losses without panic. For example, the head of “Tinkoff Bank” Oleg Tinkov said that he was not really saddened by the loss of a quarter of a billion dollars.
“Yesterday I lost $250 million in a day, but there were even worse days, I lost a billion, the positive is really, in fact, the day, I just returned from Kamchatka, I rode there on a volcano, in this sense, to be on the stock market in Russia – it’s like living on a volcano,” Tinkov said, speaking at the Exchange Forum in Moscow.
