Glazyev Demonstrates How Russian Central Bank’s Policy Has Favored International Speculators

Aug. 16, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—After the head of the Central Bank of Russia, Elvira Nabiullina, called an emergency CBR meeting Aug. 14 to raise interest rates from 8.5% to 12%, purportedly to stop the ongoing sharp devaluation of the ruble, leading Russian economist Sergey Glazyev issued two posts on his Telegram channel that were sharply critical of this monetarist “shock therapy” approach.

On Aug. 14 Glazyev (in Russian) wrote:

“In every wave of ruble devaluation, speculators close to the monetary authorities make huge profits by manipulating the market. This is a criminal affair, to which neither law enforcement nor the regulators pay attention. In any country with a developed market economy such manipulators would long ago have been jailed, one after another. But here they become billionaires, at the cost of depreciation of everyone else’s income and savings. And they’re still babbling about monetary policy being too loose.”

And then on Aug. 15 he wrote:

“The management of the Bank of Russia, (in Russian) once again applying their tried-and-true two-part method—a tremendous devaluation of the ruble and a sharp increase in interest rates, is plunging the economy into a state of clinical death. For the sake of superprofits for currency speculators, it is halting the recovery that had barely begun.”

In addition to Glazyev, there are strong disagreements with the Bank of Russia’s policies within leading Russian circles. The Economist reported that “On Aug. 14th Maxim Oreshkin, an adviser to Mr. Putin, wrote a column stressing the importance of a strong ruble and blaming the currency’s fall on the central bank.” And RT took note of an Aug. 15 meeting between

“the government” and exporting companies, to discuss reversing Nabiullina’s elimination of one of the government’s strongest capital controls: the requirement that 80% of export earnings be kept inside Russia, preventing their being deposited abroad, largely for speculative purposes. RT noted that the meeting in question ended “with no breakthrough reached.”