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| Subject: As if that will help: Russia picks new monetary policy chief as currency plummets Fri Jan 16, 2015 3:59 am | |
| Yudaeva, who remains a first deputy to Governor Elvira Nabiullina, will focus on forecasting, strategy and financial stability, she told reporters in Moscow. Yudaeva, who joined the bank in September 2013, was in charge of monetary policy as the regulator lurched from one crisis to another after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine last year. While policy makers deployed emergency steps including interest-rate increases and spent $88 billion in interventions to prop up the currency, Putin last month scolded the regulator for not reacting to the crisis more quickly. "Expectations were that heads would roll after the fiasco over management of the exchange rate and monetary policy late last year," Timothy Ash, an economist at Standard Bank Group in London, said by e-mail.
The Russian currency has extended its decline since the end of 2014 to 6.7 percent, surpassed only by the Belarusian ruble among more than 170 currencies tracked by Bloomberg. Policymakers are struggling to contain the country's worst currency crisis in almost 17 years as the ruble lost almost 50 percent against the dollar in the past 12 months. The central bank shifted to a free-floating exchange rate ahead of schedule in November and is overseeing a 1 trillion-ruble ($15 billion) bank recapitalization plan. The ruble weakened 41 percent against the dollar last year. On Dec. 16, the central bank took its biggest step to shore up the currency, raising its key interest rate to 17 percent from 10.5 percent in a surprise announcement just before 1 a.m. in Moscow that day.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-blm-news-bc-russia-monetary15-20150115-story.html |
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