Solving the problem of a too strong ruble will cost the budget billions of dollars, experts interviewed by Vedomosti came to this conclusion. The most difficult thing will be to choose currencies through which the authorities will be able to carry out foreign exchange interventions.
Maxim Petronevich, senior economist at Otkritie Bank, estimates the cost of a sharp decline in the ruble at about $3-5 billion, or 159-265 billion rubles a month at the current exchange rate. Such expenses would help return the dollar to the range of 60-70 rubles. An increase in interventions to $20-25 billion per quarter, according to Denis Popov, chief analyst at Promsvyazbank (PSB), would help the ruble collapse and keep the exchange rate in the 70-75 per dollar corridor.
But the chief analyst of Sovcombank, Mikhail Vasiliev, does not believe that interventions will be able to significantly change the dynamics of the exchange rate before the restoration of imports to Russia. According to him, due to high energy prices, Russia receives about $0.5-1 billion of currency per day, that is, about $15-30 billion per month, and in order to overcome this flow of currency, the costs of weakening the ruble should be approximately identical.
Among the most promising currencies for intervention and savings, experts named the Chinese yuan, Kazakhstani tenge, Hong Kong dollar, Turkish lira, Belarusian ruble, South African rand and Armenian dram. The problem is that only the Chinese yuan has real "reserve" properties among these currencies, while the rest are subject to high volatility and are not very suitable for the formation of reserves.
The desire to conduct large-scale foreign exchange interventions with the help of the resumption of the budget rule was previously announced by Finance Minister Anton Siluanov. The authorities are afraid to intervene through the dollar and the euro directly, so they intend to do this by buying up the currencies of "friendly" countries. The head of the Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, supported the idea , but urged to carefully choose currencies instead of dollars and euros. Maxim Reshetnikov, head of the Ministry of Economic Development, is still against the idea: he insists that it is impossible to accurately estimate the required volume of interventions, and the risks of losing funds to stimulate the economy are too serious.
