Putin’s conference – no major announcements; Putin backs the Government and CBR

RUSSIA ENERGY / FINANCE - In Brief 18 Dec 2014 by Marcel Salikhov

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Today President V. Putin gave a lengthy (3+ hours long) live press-conference answering journalists’ questions on different topics. It’s a traditional event taking place since 2011 with omissions in 2008-2011 when P.Putin held the position of prime minister. Given a ‘perfect storm’ on Russian financial markets the conferenct attracted huge interest with expectations of some major news coming. As CBR announced its set of measures of support for banking sector yesterday we were not expecting important decisions. And answering live questions from the audience in general is not a good a format for delivering detailed messages. But it was important to understand whether hostile rhetoric on foreign relations started to melt. Basically there were no surprises whether positive or negative ones. President repeated his usual points on foreign policy. He insisted on official interpretation of Ukrainian events and defended the concept of ‘Russian national interests’. One can conclude that ‘Black Monday’ and ‘Black Tuesday’ of this week haven’t led to changes in Putin’s stance. President in general backed CBR and the Government dealing with the financial stress but asked CBR to be faster in their decisions. General strategy of economic policy in current circumstances, according to the President, is to ‘wait and see’ until global economy becomes stronger and oil prices start to increase. He seemed to be not concerned with recession next year or two and increasing inflation due to RUB devaluation. FX market stayed roughly stable during the conference @ 62-63 USD/RUB probably supported by CBR. Today CBR also published data of its FX interventions on December, 16 when key rate was incr...