Central Bank's reserves decline

The volume of gold and currency reserves of the Russian Central Bank amounted to $47.8bn as of December 6, 2002. It means they decreased by $400m over the previous week. Last time when the volume of reserves dropped was registered on October 18. Moreover, this has been the largest decrease over a one-week period since the beginning of 2002. The highest drop before that had amounted to only $300m. As a result the Central Bank's reserves have returned to the levels that were registered in the second half of November. This makes the increase in gold and currency reserves to $50bn by the end of 2002, as the Russian President has recently declared, quite problematic.

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