The ruble will be able to strengthen to the values of 2019 by the end of this year or by the beginning of 2022, financial analyst Andrey Maslov told the Prime agency. According to him, such a scenario is possible if it is possible to defeat the coronavirus, and the raw material component will also give a large growth, if geopolitics does not intervene.
“The talks about the return of the ruble to its previous historical milestones have been going on since 2014 and occur every time the ruble rate breaks up another level of resistance,” he said. Speaking about the factors that can negatively affect the ruble exchange rate, the expert pointed to the possible disconnection of Russia from SWIFT and the limitation of investments in the secondary Russian government debt.
The sanctions pressure on Russia had a rather limited impact on the national currency, Maslov said. According to him, US sanctions are unlikely to critically weaken the ruble. “It should be understood that the share of non-residents in the Russian public debt has been decreasing for several years and is already less than 30%, and disconnecting from SWIFT will harm both Russian banks working with foreign clients, and vice versa, and in general will simply complicate trivial procedures”, – explained the expert.
The SWIFT system allows you to transfer information and make payments between banks in different countries. More than 11 thousand financial organizations from more than 200 countries of the world, including Russia, are connected to it. The issue of disconnecting Russia from the system has been repeatedly raised by other states. In particular, on April 29 this year, the majority of the European Parliament (EP) deputies supported a resolution proposing to disconnect Russia from this system.
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