Why is the rouble in trouble?

FrieFrench

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The rouble smashed through resistance to an all-time low of 65.5 to the dollar, falling a jaw-dropping 11%, in a crescendo of selling on Monday, as oil prices continued to slide and markets braced for a likely default in Ukraine.

The Russian currency has lost half its value since President Vladimir Putin first sent forces into Ukraine, setting off a chain of events that the Kremlin can no longer control.

In the bleakest official forecast yet from Moscow, the Russian central bank warned that the country could see a 4.5 per cent to 4.7 per cent contraction in GDP next year if oil prices remained at $60 a barrel.

Via Why is the rouble in trouble?
 
ummm, because corrupt western officials are busy indulging in financial warfare tactics upon the Russian Federation because that way they can mask it or cover it up through the use of their just as corrupt puppet media rather than heading to Russia with a physical attack?

My guess :innocent:
 
The rouble smashed through resistance to an all-time low of 65.5 to the dollar, falling a jaw-dropping 11%, in a crescendo of selling on Monday, as oil prices continued to slide and markets braced for a likely default in Ukraine.

The Russian currency has lost half its value since President Vladimir Putin first sent forces into Ukraine, setting off a chain of events that the Kremlin can no longer control.

In the bleakest official forecast yet from Moscow, the Russian central bank warned that the country could see a 4.5 per cent to 4.7 per cent contraction in GDP next year if oil prices remained at $60 a barrel.

Via Why is the rouble in trouble?


Russian economy is extremely weak, corrupt, oil-dependable so don't see anything strange in crisis looming large so rapidly..:LOL: Just benefited on recent ruble slump with a couple of short-term bull USD/RUB trades. Spread on HF was good, but recently their CBR has restricting liquidity by lifting up loan rate, so now there is no fish left to bail out..
 
Russian economy is extremely weak, corrupt, oil-dependable so don't see anything strange in crisis looming large so rapidly..:LOL: Just benefited on recent ruble slump with a couple of short-term bull USD/RUB trades. Spread on HF was good, but recently their CBR has restricting liquidity by lifting up loan rate, so now there is no fish left to bail out..

the ruble price keep falling, and seem everyone here happy with that , but seem few brokers pull out usdrub pair and not anymore available for trade. just got some rumors spread there's brokers' client who receive an email said the usdrub are not available in their platform, others made a 'special' rule by shrink the leverage for usdrub pair only, i just need this clarify did anyone here got some those kind of email from their current brokers, since i dont had any such annoucnment from armada markets or any brokers account i'm with, everything goes normal, just curious this sudden pull out are truly exist, a copy pasted email contain this issue would be good, just curious.
 
Russian economy is extremely weak, corrupt, oil-dependable so don't see anything strange in crisis looming large so rapidly..:LOL: Just benefited on recent ruble slump with a couple of short-term bull USD/RUB trades. Spread on HF was good, but recently their CBR has restricting liquidity by lifting up loan rate, so now there is no fish left to bail out..

It is all about gas and oil that accounts for approximately 2/3 of Russia's exports and half of federal budget revenues. The U.S. is forcing the price down to destroy Russia's economy as it is no longer dealing in petrodollars and will have to pay back high yield loans in USD. Making manufactures unable to produce in Russia if they did like China the Russian economy would grow at over 5% and we know that. We are in an economic war with Russia, and Iran soon China.The U.S. did this to Japan in 1941 and declared war by imposing an oil embargo.
Russia’s debt totals 13.4% of its GDP. Its budget deficit in relation to GDP is only 0.5%. The US GDP from lets say from 2013 $16.8 trillion (now much more) US budget deficit totals 4% of GDP, versus 0.5% for Russia. Who's economy is weak? Russian economy is more soundly financed than America’s. Russia and china have been stockpiling gold even when saving the Ruble Putin was and is spending billions on gold. No crisis? Just currency wars
 
The U.S. did this to Japan in 1941 and declared war by imposing an oil embargo.

I think you will find that the US declared war on Japan because they did a sneaky attack on the US Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbour.

The trooble with the rooble is Russia's President.
Eastern Ukraine was given by Kruschev to Ukraine. Nobody knows quite why but there it was until recently. There was an overwhelming democratic vote to go back to Russia. If Putin was a cleverer man he would have played it differently and got it back peacefully. As it is there may be the embers to start WW3 quite unnecessarily. Russia is the biggest country geographically and doesn't need The Crimea, except it's Black Sea fleet is there.
Putin harps back to the days of Imperialism ( long forgotten anywhere else ) to further enlarge an already huge country.
 
It is all about gas and oil that accounts for approximately 2/3 of Russia's exports and half of federal budget revenues. The U.S. is forcing the price down to destroy Russia's economy as it is no longer dealing in petrodollars and will have to pay back high yield loans in USD. Making manufactures unable to produce in Russia if they did like China the Russian economy would grow at over 5% and we know that. We are in an economic war with Russia, and Iran soon China.The U.S. did this to Japan in 1941 and declared war by imposing an oil embargo.
Russia’s debt totals 13.4% of its GDP. Its budget deficit in relation to GDP is only 0.5%. The US GDP from lets say from 2013 $16.8 trillion (now much more) US budget deficit totals 4% of GDP, versus 0.5% for Russia. Who's economy is weak? Russian economy is more soundly financed than America’s. Russia and china have been stockpiling gold even when saving the Ruble Putin was and is spending billions on gold. No crisis? Just currency wars


Interesting. Had to read up on diplomatic background to the Pacific War, interesting.

Fully agree that countries are at war on an economic level - US with Russia, yes, but also UK with Germany. These are in fact matters of life and death but only rarely emerge into armed hostilities, though that doesn't make currency wars less mortally important. If we can't afford power, healthcare and imported food, are not some of our people going to die?
 
Interesting. Had to read up on diplomatic background to the Pacific War, interesting.

Fully agree that countries are at war on an economic level - US with Russia, yes, but also UK with Germany. These are in fact matters of life and death but only rarely emerge into armed hostilities, though that doesn't make currency wars less mortally important. If we can't afford power, healthcare and imported food, are not some of our people going to die?

Unfortunately the leaders of countries have to have one eye on their own people and many decisions are made with that uppermost in mind. Coupled with the fact of nationalist sabre rattling goes down well with the home electorate/people and a natural human stubbornness. The latter is seen as strength while sometimes it can be foolhardy. Putin can't back down now without looking weak and foolish starting what he couldn't finish . So Merkal/Hollande would be wise to give him a face saving way out to de-escalate a possible major conflict.

To understand Russian foreign policy mentality then read up on Muscarova - their art of covert war.
 
Unfortunately the leaders of countries have to have one eye on their own people and many decisions are made with that uppermost in mind. Coupled with the fact of nationalist sabre rattling goes down well with the home electorate/people and a natural human stubbornness. The latter is seen as strength while sometimes it can be foolhardy. Putin can't back down now without looking weak and foolish starting what he couldn't finish . So Merkal/Hollande would be wise to give him a face saving way out to de-escalate a possible major conflict.

To understand Russian foreign policy mentality then read up on Muscarova - their art of covert war.

Didn't all this fiasco start with Ukraine wanting to be part of eu?

Similar to the eu accepting the Croats and thus braking up the old Yugoslavia, kicking off the last balkans war.
 
I think you will find that the US declared war on Japan because they did a sneaky attack on the US Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbour.

The trooble with the rooble is Russia's President.
Eastern Ukraine was given by Kruschev to Ukraine. Nobody knows quite why but there it was until recently. There was an overwhelming democratic vote to go back to Russia. If Putin was a cleverer man he would have played it differently and got it back peacefully. As it is there may be the embers to start WW3 quite unnecessarily. Russia is the biggest country geographically and doesn't need The Crimea, except it's Black Sea fleet is there.
Putin harps back to the days of Imperialism ( long forgotten anywhere else ) to further enlarge an already huge country.

I'm not condoning Pearl Harbour but the US placed sanctions on Japan before that. Japan was empire building and was an ally of the Axis. They had it coming but they considered that a treacherous attack on the US fleet was the only chance they had of getting the upper hand of the Americans. They seriously underestimated the Yanks- to our good fortune.

Isn't Putin ex-KGB? The Russian democratic movement made a serious error in allowing him into power. I'll have to read up on how that happened. There is,also, a strong sector of Russian politics that keeps allowing him back in.
 
Didn't all this fiasco start with Ukraine wanting to be part of eu?

.

The west bit wanted to be part of the EU and the eastern bit to be part of Russia as confirmed by a big majority vote as far as I know. The vote is ignored by the West even though they are mostly Russian speakers.

The obvious solution might be to let the eastern bit be an autonomous area. Really not worth fighting over imho
 
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I'm not condoning Pearl Harbour but the US placed sanctions on Japan before that. Japan was empire building and was an ally of the Axis. They had it coming but they considered that a treacherous attack on the US fleet was the only chance they had of getting the upper hand of the Americans. They seriously underestimated the Yanks- to our good fortune.

Isn't Putin ex-KGB? The Russian democratic movement made a serious error in allowing him into power. I'll have to read up on how that happened. There is,also, a strong sector of Russian politics that keeps allowing him back in.


Boris Yeltsin was a fat alcholic slob who didn't have a clue what was happening to Russia. The old guard rescued Russia from theft by democracky imo.
 
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Boris Yeltsin was a fat alcholic slob who didn't have a clue what was happening to Russia imo. The old guard rescued Russia from theft by democracky imo.

Putin has stopped the probable break up of Russia after Yeltsin but gone on to having delusions of old imperial Russia expanding in every direction. As if they aren't plenty big enough already.
 
The main source of the problem can be found in the 40% drop in global oil prices since the summer not helped with Western sanctions imposed in response to Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

For me the poor economic situation is also the result of a lack of inward investment towards opportunities that exist in our modern times. Putin during his time in charge has not really attempted to modernise Russia, the country still remains massively dependent on oil and gas exports, exactly how it was in Soviet times. Putin has failed to bring the Russian economy into the modern era which we see is so much centred around technology and innovation.
 
The main source of the problem can be found in the 40% drop in global oil prices since the summer not helped with Western sanctions imposed in response to Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

For me the poor economic situation is also the result of a lack of inward investment towards opportunities that exist in our modern times. Putin during his time in charge has not really attempted to modernise Russia, the country still remains massively dependent on oil and gas exports, exactly how it was in Soviet times. Putin has failed to bring the Russian economy into the modern era which we see is so much centred around technology and innovation.

Technological path of development takes ages, not years. Putin with its sophisticated and tangled political course seeks to obtain other levy and pull up economics through geopolitical pressure and in no way by internal reforms.
While big guys are contributing to lingering crisis, I expect to enter long on USD/RUB on my Tickmill platform, as tax period is brought to a close in Russia (thus lack of demand for ruble from Russian exporters).
Good luck for those pursuing their pips on USD/RUB:)
 
I liked the story of the US rancher/cowboy who is raising a herd of cattle in the vast open spaces of central Russia. Just like the old West !
 
America is being marginalized. While the American President has been reforming immigration and healthcare, he has been in complete denial in regards to pissing Putin off and making more enemies than any other president known. Our allies are disappointed and now China and Russia are teaming up and let us not forget whom we are going up ageist. I wrote last year the Putin was putting a team together and now we see this all coming together as conflict in Yemen grows Iran and Syria seem to be looking to Putin as not only a new partner but as a major solution.
 
America is being marginalized. While the American President has been reforming immigration and healthcare, he has been in complete denial in regards to pissing Putin off and making more enemies than any other president known. Our allies are disappointed and now China and Russia are teaming up and let us not forget whom we are going up ageist. I wrote last year the Putin was putting a team together and now we see this all coming together as conflict in Yemen grows Iran and Syria seem to be looking to Putin as not only a new partner but as a major solution.

He did solve the break away Chechen problem but only by killing thousands and destroying much of the capital. His hands are bloody to say the least. Maybe that is what attracts other killers in the Middle East. Yuk - no thanks !

Just beating each other into the ground imho. The ME may be the cradle of civilization but they haven't progressed much philosophicly or morally over the past 5,000 years.
 
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Anyone who wants to understand Vladimir Putin today needs to know the story of what happened to him on a dramatic night in East Germany a quarter of a century ago.

It is 5 December 1989 in Dresden, a few weeks after the Berlin Wall has fallen. East German communism is dying on its feet, people power seems irresistible.

Crowds storm the Dresden headquarters of the Stasi, the East German secret police, who suddenly seem helpless.

Then a small group of demonstrators decides to head across the road, to a large house that is the local headquarters of the Soviet secret service, the KGB.

"The guard on the gate immediately rushed back into the house," recalls one of the group, Siegfried Dannath. But shortly afterwards "an officer emerged - quite small, agitated".




"He said to our group, 'Don't try to force your way into this property. My comrades are armed, and they're authorised to use their weapons in an emergency.'"

That persuaded the group to withdraw.

But the KGB officer knew how dangerous the situation remained. He described later how he rang the headquarters of a Red Army tank unit to ask for protection.

The answer he received was a devastating, life-changing shock.

"We cannot do anything without orders from Moscow," the voice at the other end replied. "And Moscow is silent."

That phrase, "Moscow is silent" has haunted this man ever since. Defiant yet helpless as the 1989 revolution swept over him, he has now himself become "Moscow" - the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin.


"I think it's the key to understanding Putin," says his German biographer, Boris Reitschuster. "We would have another Putin and another Russia without his time in East Germany."

The experience taught him lessons he has never forgotten, gave him ideas for a model society, and shaped his ambitions for a powerful network and personal wealth.

Above all, it left him with a huge anxiety about the frailty of political elites, and how easily they can be overthrown by the people.

Putin had arrived in Dresden in the mid-1980s for his first foreign posting as a KGB agent.

The German Democratic Republic or GDR - a communist state created out of the Soviet-occupied zone of post-Nazi Germany - was a highly significant outpost of Moscow's power, up close to Western Europe, full of Soviet military and spies.

Putin had wanted to join the KGB since he was a teenager, inspired by popular Soviet stories of secret service bravado in which, he recalled later, "One man's effort could achieve what whole armies could not. One spy could decide the fate of thousands of people."

Initially, though, much of his work in Dresden was humdrum.

Among documents in the Stasi archives in Dresden is a letter from Putin asking for help from the Stasi boss with the installation of an informer's phone.

Putin's request for a telephone to be provided for an informer
And there are details too of endless Soviet-East German social gatherings Putin attended, to celebrate ties between the two countries.

But if the spy work wasn't that exciting, Putin and his young family could at least enjoy the East German good life.

Putin's then wife, Ludmila, later recalled that life in the GDR was very different from life in the USSR. "The streets were clean. They would wash their windows once a week," she said in an interview published in 2000, as part of First Person, a book of interviews with Russia's new and then little-known acting president.

The Putins lived in a special block of flats with KGB and Stasi families for neighbours, though Ludmila envied the fact that: "The GDR state security people got higher salaries than our guys, judging from how our German neighbours lived. Of course we tried to economise and save up enough to buy a car."


East Germany enjoyed higher living standards than the Soviet Union and a former KGB colleague, Vladimir Usoltsev, describes Putin spending hours leafing through Western mail-order catalogues, to keep up with fashions and trends.

He also enjoyed the beer - securing a special weekly supply of the local brew, Radeberger - which left him looking rather less trim than he does in the bare-chested sporty images issued by Russian presidential PR today.

East Germany differed from the USSR in another way too - it had a number of separate political parties, even though it was still firmly under communist rule, or appeared to be.

"He enjoyed very much this little paradise for him," says Boris Reitschuster. East Germany, he says, "is his model of politics especially. He rebuilt some kind of East Germany in Russia now."

But in autumn 1989 this paradise became a kind of KGB hell. On the streets of Dresden, Putin observed people power emerging in extraordinary ways.


In early October hundreds of East Germans who had claimed political asylum at the West German embassy in Prague were allowed to travel to the West in sealed trains. As they passed through Dresden, huge crowds tried to break through a security cordon to try to board the trains, and make their own escape.

Wolfgang Berghofer, Dresden's communist mayor at the time, says there was chaos as security forces began taking on almost the entire local population. Many assumed violence was inevitable.

"A Soviet tank army was stationed in our city," he says. "And its generals said to me clearly: 'If we get the order from Moscow, the tanks will roll.'"

After the Berlin Wall opened, on 9 November, the crowds became bolder everywhere - approaching the citadels of Stasi and KGB power in Dresden.


Vladimir Putin had doubtless assumed too that those senior Soviet officers - men he'd socialised with regularly - would indeed send in the tanks.

But no, Moscow under Mikhail Gorbachev "was silent". The Red Army tanks would not be used. "Nobody lifted a finger to protect us."

He and his KGB colleagues frantically burned evidence of their intelligence work.

"I personally burned a huge amount of material," Putin recalled in First Person. "We burned so much stuff that the furnace burst."

Two weeks later there was more trauma for Putin as West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl arrived in the city. He made a speech that left German reunification looking inevitable, and East Germany doomed.

Helmut Kohl in Dresden December 1989
Kohl praised Gorbachev, the man in Moscow who'd refused to send in the tanks, and he used patriotic language - words like Vaterland, or fatherland - that had been largely taboo in Germany since the war. Now they prompted an ecstatic response.

It's not known whether Putin was in that crowd - but as a KGB agent in Dresden he'd certainly have known all about it.

The implosion of East Germany in the following months marked a huge rupture in his and his family's life.

"We had the horrible feeling that the country that had almost become our home would no longer exist," said his wife Ludmila.

"My neighbour, who was my friend, cried for a week. It was the collapse of everything - their lives, their careers."

One of Putin's key Stasi contacts, Maj Gen Horst Boehm - the man who had helped him install that precious telephone line for an informer - was humiliated by the demonstrating crowds, and committed suicide early in 1990.

This warning about what can happen when people power becomes dominant was one Putin could now ponder on the long journey home.

"Their German friends give them a 20-year-old washing machine and with this they drive back to Leningrad," says Putin biographer and critic Masha Gessen. "There's a strong sense that he was serving his country and had nothing to show for it."

Vladimir Putin in 1999

Putin worked for the mayor of St Petersburg (1990-96), then moved to Moscow and rose rapidly to the top

He also arrived back to a country that had been transformed under Mikhail Gorbachev and was itself on the verge of collapse.

"He found himself in a country that had changed in ways that he didn't understand and didn't want to accept," as Gessen puts it.

His home city, Leningrad, was now becoming St Petersburg again. What would Putin do there?

There was talk, briefly, of taxi-driving. But soon Putin realised he had acquired a much more valuable asset than a second-hand washing machine.

In Dresden he'd been part of a network of individuals who might have lost their Soviet roles, but were well placed to prosper personally and politically in the new Russia.

In the Stasi archives in Dresden a picture survives of Putin during his Dresden years. He's in a group of senior Soviet and East German military and security figures - a relatively junior figure, off to one side, but already networking among the elite.


Prof Karen Dawisha of Miami University, author of Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?, says there are people he met in Dresden "who have then gone on… to be part of his inner core".

They include Sergey Chemezov, who for years headed Russia's arms export agency and now runs a state programme supporting technology, and Nikolai Tokarev head of the state pipeline company, Transneft.

And it's not only former Russian colleagues who've stayed close to Putin.

Take Matthias Warnig - a former Stasi officer, believed to have spent time in Dresden when Putin was there - who is now managing director of Nordstream, the pipeline taking gas directly from Russia to Germany across the Baltic Sea.

That pipeline symbolised what was seen, until recently, as Germany's new special relationship with Russia - though the Ukraine crisis has at the very least put that relationship on hold.

Putin-watchers believe events such as the uprising on Kiev's Maidan Square, have revived bad memories - above all, of that night in Dresden in December 1989.

"Now when you have crowds in Kiev in 2004, in Moscow in 2011 or in Kiev in 2013 and 2014, I think he remembers this time in Dresden," says Boris Reitschuster. "And all these old fears come up inside him."

Putin in Dresden in 2006
Inside him too may be a memory of how change can be shaped not only by force, or by weakness - but also by emotion. In 1989 he saw in Dresden how patriotic feeling, combined with a yearning for democracy, proved so much more powerful than communist ideology.

So when wondering what Vladimir Putin will do next, it's well worth remembering what he's lived through already.

One thing seems sure. While Vladimir Putin holds power in the Kremlin, Moscow is unlikely to be silent.
 

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