Banks Face Ruble Deficit Despite Large Balances At Correspondent Accounts

The balances at banks' correspondent accounts had substantially increased as of the beginning of operations today both in Russia in general and in the Moscow region. For Russia in general the volume of growth amounted to over 11 billion rubles (about $365 million), and the corresponding figure for Moscow was 10.6 billion rubles (about $351.7 million). As a result, the amounts at bank correspondent accounts reached 111.5 billion rubles (about $3.7 billion) and over 65 billion rubles (about $2.2 billion) respectively. These figures are very high, in particular, the first one, which is a record for almost the whole year. Nevertheless, banks are still facing a serious deficit of rubles, dealers report. According to them, in the afternoon on December 28, the fifth business day of the week, the interest rates for one-day credits in rubles for 'second-class' banks reached 60-80%. The experts point out that the noticeable lack of rubles may be due to the absence of ruble offers by large market participants, such as Sberbank and Vneshtorgbank. Following their example, many commercial banks are awaiting, the experts think. They remarked on the fact that banks' low activity in deals on buying dollars to be financed before the New Year is not facilitating the appearance of available ruble resources on the market, and accordingly, is not leading to a noticeable improvement of the situation with ruble liquidity.