Central Bank Chairman Elvira Nabiullina said yesterday that the Bank of Russia will intervene in the situation on the foreign exchange market when it sees a threat to the country's financial stability. Is today's market panic such a threat?

The depreciation of the ruble that has occurred since the New Year was primarily associated with oil prices. This reduction was indeed fundamentally justified. And the Central Bank had no reason to support the currency. This would be a waste of money: until yesterday we did not see an overly strong market reaction, the ruble fell even less than the price of a barrel of oil.

The correlation with oil prices, which previously was almost equal to one after the introduction of Western sanctions, has weakened. From October last year until yesterday, the ruble exchange rate fell by about half as much as oil prices fell.

At the beginning of today, the exchange rate was about 82 rubles. per dollar. According to our estimates, this rate corresponded to the average rate that could have developed this year at an oil price of $30 per barrel. Yes, the ruble could be 10% weaker than this level. But this would require panic and increased capital flight due to the realization that the price of oil has become low for an extended period of time. This scenario may or may not come true, but in the morning the exchange rate was fair.

If the situation this morning is only a slight deviation and volatility remains low, I do not think that the Central Bank will try to support the ruble in any way. Even if oil continues to decline and will remain low for a long time. In such a scenario, no matter where the exchange rate goes, the Central Bank will not support the ruble in any way - what we have been seeing since the beginning of the year.

What can the Central Bank unsettle and force to intervene? A sharp increase in exchange rate volatility, the appearance of signs of panic in the market, which could provoke its spread from the foreign exchange market, where professional participants trade, to the population. In this case, it is more expedient - and much cheaper - to extinguish this panic at the beginning than to wait for it to spread to the wider masses and try to put out the fire when it has already flared up.

In the event of sharp volatility, I would expect announcements from the Central Bank - that is, primarily verbal interventions - about possible support for the exchange rate. He could probably expand the volume of foreign currency refinancing by sharply reducing rates on foreign currency repo transactions - to the levels that were at the beginning of 2015, when banks were in demand for such instruments.

The Central Bank also has traditional interventions in the foreign exchange market and direct sales of foreign currency. And the Ministry of Finance could decide to sell a certain amount of currency from its treasury accounts or from the reserve fund. I don’t think that this could be significant volumes, more than $5 billion - the Ministry of Finance could come up with such an initiative.

Is now the time to intervene? Let's look at three cases. What has happened since the beginning of the year is a completely normal level of depreciation of the ruble with low fluctuations in exchange rates. What happened on December 16, 2014 is a situation on the opposite side of the scale, it is a collapse. Today we observed a decrease in the ruble by 5% in 3 hours. This has never happened before this year.

The reasons are not known exactly; the behavior of the ruble differs from the behavior of other currencies. One can assume the influence of some micromarket factors associated, for example, with the triggering of stop loss mechanisms, when upon reaching certain price levels, traders begin to automatically execute orders to close “long” positions in the ruble. That is, get rid of rubles in order to limit losses from the fall of the ruble.

This is, of course, not a collapse. Level 85 rub. per dollar does not in itself pose any systemic threats to the economy. But if the fall continues - and, for example, the next day the ruble will lose not 5%, but, say, 10% over the same time period (that is, it will exceed the threshold of 90-92 rubles per dollar), then this may become a reason for the Central Bank to intervene and somehow pay off this jump. Only in order to prevent the growth of panic, which will lead to real costs for the economy.

about the author

Oleg Kuzmin Chief Economist of Renaissance Capital in Russia and the CIS The point of view of the authors whose articles are published in the “Opinions” section may not coincide with the opinion of the editors. Research store Analytics on the topic "Banks"

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