Dollar trade volume tops $260m

In the afternoon of September 4, 2002 the trade volume of tom operationsreached $260m on the interbank foreign currency market. Today long beforethe trade session closing, the trade volume topped the figure reported atthe afternoon trade session on Tuesday. Taking into account this fact,commercial banks' dealers point out that traders' activity grew further onWednesday as compared to the previous business day. According tospecialists, a substantial drop in balances of correspondent accounts ofRussian commercial banks has not led to a deteriorated situation with rubleliquidity and the deficit of ruble resources on the market yet. The factthat ruble credit rates are low (3-4 percent on Wednesday afternoon) isevidence of the sufficient volume of rubles on the market. The RussianCentral Bank implemented aggressive large-scale interventions into thetrade on the interbank currency market, experts stressed. It is owing to ahuge volume of dollars sold by the Central Bank that even the high ondollar exchange rate quotes did not rise over RUR31.64 per dollar, which isonly RUR0.03 higher than the official dollar exchange rate set by theCentral Bank for Thursday, experts pointed out. .