Russen namen in augustus veel geld op van de banken. Maar dat hebben we eerder gezien, in mei,
teacup in "De situatie binnen Rusland" en verder.
Nu is het op zich geen nieuws dat de Russen hun geld opnemen. Sinds 2024 heft Rusland belasting op spaartegoeden. The Washington Post (deelartikel:
https://wapo.st/4qvy0Fy) komt nu opnieuw met het verhaal.
Russians pull billions from banks, fearing Kremlin will seize deposits for war
De angst voor het gedwongen moeten omzetten van spaargeld in staatsobligaties, wat in die vorige post ook al is aangedragen, speelt dus nog steeds.
Over wat voor opnames hebben we het?
Nearly $3.4 billion (286.4 billion rubles) was withdrawn in the first two weeks of August, on top of the $7.3 billion withdrawn in July and more than $4.5 billion in June, according to Russian Central Bank data.
Nu waren de opnames in het eerste oorlogsjaar al een extreem voorbeeld:
The total siphoned out this year already exceeds the $24.7 billion (2 trillion rubles) removed in the first year following the February 2022 invasion.
Voor 2026 lijkt het dubbele van 2022 te worden opgenomen:
Total withdrawals this year could nearly double the amount taken out in the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, according to Taras Skvortsov, a senior executive at Sberbank, Russia’s biggest retail financial institution.
Dit gaat niet zonder gevolgen:
The withdrawals are causing liquidity problems, according to Skvortsov and a former senior Russian finance official, overstretching a financial sector already strained by increasing levels of bad debts following a government-directed lending boom to ramp up military output.
Banken hadden in die eerste twee weken van de invasie in 2022 geen goed antwoord op de massale opnames:
In the first two weeks of the invasion, $23 billion fled the system, and banks appeared to be imperiled by depositors and businesses lining up to empty their accounts, until the government stemmed the drain by imposing tough capital controls and sharply raising interest rates.
Nieuw is dat het nu niet alleen over particulieren gaat, maar ook over grote bedrijven:
Now, big businesses are also seeking to move money out of the reach of Russian regulators as anxiety grows over potential asset seizures. That is further exacerbating the problems, the former official said.
Ook nu kan het tot problemen leiden:
For some banks this really is a problem,” the former official said. “They didn’t expect this, and they invested all the cash elsewhere, and yet people are coming and taking out half a trillion rubles a month.
De staatsobligaties stonden wel degelijk in de planning, maar zijn even teruggetrokken:
The Finance Ministry last month was forced to cancel planned bond issues, even though it has become ever more dependent on them as a means of filling a yawning budget deficit as spending on the military continues to grow while the economy stalls.
Aan de andere kant worden banken gedwongen om slechte leningen af te sluiten met de militaire industrie, waarvan maar vraag is hoe die uiteindelijk gedekt raken.
Een hoofdeconoom van een grote staatsbank raakte ontslagen voor zijn defaitisme:
In a sign of how sensitive the strain on Russia’s finances is becoming for the Kremlin, the chief economist at VEB, one of the country’s biggest state banks, Andrei Klepach, was fired from his post this weekend after commenting that Russia could not win a war of attrition against Ukraine while Kyiv is supported by the West.
“We won’t win the competition in this war of attrition,” Klepach said in a presentation he made in May, which was circulated in the media last week. “We’re under the illusion that everything [in Ukraine] will collapse. It hasn’t, and it won’t. Meanwhile, the costs we bear are mounting.”