Russia

Russian households withdrew foreign currency worth $9.8 billion from their accounts in March and banks cut new corporate lending by around one third, the central bank said on Wednesday, as western sanctions over events in Ukraine spooked consumers, Reuters reported. "The quarter was difficult, to put it bluntly. It was very worrying at certain moments, but most importantly, the situation managed to stabilise," said Alexander Danilov, director of the central bank's banking regulation and analytics department. "The banking sector faced significant outflow of the population's funds ...

As Russia teeters on the brink of a historic default, foreign investors in the country's debt have few palatable options to recover their money: bet on costly legal action, trust bilateral agreements will stand, or sit on their hands, according to a Reuters analysis. Foreign creditors would typically try to band together to negotiate, go to court or in some cases seek arbitration in cases of default, but Western sanctions in the wake of Moscow's invasion of Ukraine and the peculiarities of Russian sovereign bonds make those options hard at the moment, lawyers said.

Russia’s payment of rubles on two dollar bonds was ruled a potential default by a derivatives panel, bringing holders of insurance contracts on the debt closer to a payout, Bloomberg News reported. The Credit Derivatives Determinations Committee said Wednesday that a “Potential Failure-to-Pay” event occurred for credit-default swaps when Russia paid rubles after foreign banks declined to process U.S. currency transfers. The group, which includes Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Barclays Plc and JPMorgan Chase & Co., said the potential failure happened on April 4.

All large euro zone banks can withstand a full write-off of their Russian exposure and still respect their capital requirements, the European Central Bank's top supervisor Andrea Enria said in a letter published on Wednesday, Reuters reported. Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing Western sanctions have already forced the European units of some Russian banks out of business and caused some European lenders to leave Russia or consider such a move.

The U.S. rolled out new sanctions on Wednesday against more than 40 individuals and entities accused of evading the ongoing wave of penalties imposed on Russia as punishment for invading Ukraine, the Associated Press reported. The sanctions include the first set of penalties against cryptocurrency mining firms in relation to the war. The Treasury Department’s sanctions arm designated the commercial bank Transkapitalbank, which has operations in China and the Middle East. Transkapitalbank is a Russian privately owned commercial bank which the U.S.

Canada sanctioned Russian central bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina and 13 other “close associates of the Russian regime” in a fresh round of penalties related to the war in Ukraine, Bloomberg News reported. It marks one of the first instances where Nabiullina has shown up on a country’s sanctions list since Russia’s invasion of its neighbor in February. Australia previously sanctioned her and the central bank itself has been sanctioned.

Russia on Monday flagged a likely further cut in interest rates and more budget spending to help the economy adapt to biting western sanctions as it heads for its deepest contraction since 1994, Reuters reported. Russia faces soaring inflation and capital flight while grappling with a possible debt default after the West imposed unprecedented sanctions to punish President Vladimir Putin for sending tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24. Putin said on Monday that Russia should use its state budget to support the economy and liquidity when lending activity has waned.

Germany’s employers and unions have joined together in opposing an immediate European Union ban on natural gas imports from Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, saying such a move would lead to factory shutdowns and the loss of jobs in the bloc’s largest economy, the Associated Press reported.

Moody's said that Russia may be in default because it tried to service its dollar bonds in roubles, which would be one of the starkest consequences to date of Moscow's exclusion from the Western financial system since President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, Reuters reported. If Moscow is declared in default, it would mark Russia's first major default on foreign bonds since the years following the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, though the Kremlin says the West is forcing a default by imposing crippling sanctions.

Russia's central bank sees room for an interest rate cut as weekly inflation is slowing, Deputy Governor Alexei Zabotkin said on Thursday, Interfax new agency reported, according to Reuters. It will present new economic forecasts to coincide with its next rate-setting meeting on April 29, TASS news agency quoted him as saying. The bank raised the key rate to 20% in an emergency move in late February before cutting it to 17% last week.