Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has motivation to accept Putin’s proposal.
Photo: Dmitry Azarov
|
 |
Russia Offers Belarus Its Ruble
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin stated yesterday that he has suggested that Belarus create a “currency pool” with Russia, its partner in the Union State, and use the Russian ruble for settlements in energy trades at least until the instability on the financial markets passes. Putin was in Minsk for negotiations with the Belarusian Prime Minister Sergey Sidorenko. “The problems the American economy and American currency system have encountered today are well known to us,” the Russian prime minister said. “In that connection, there are grounds to think about what I said. For the Russian national currency, it's important.”
“Currency pool” is a term used in Great Britain in the 1940s and in Southeast Asia in the 1990s. It is the partial unification of current exchange regulation, including through international reserves. In practice, it is a unification of parts of national reserves. In Russia’s case, the changes would be mainly a matter of image. Russia’s international reserves exceed $540 billion. Those of Belarus consisted of $4.58 billion as of September 1, as determined by the International Monetary Fund, and $5.6 billion according to the Belarusians. The Belarusian National Bank does not make public the amount of its reserves it keeps in Russian rubles, but it acknowledged in its 20076 annual report that 80.1 percent of its reserves were in “currency with limited convertibility.” The Russian ruble was considered such a currency at the beginning of 2007.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has motivation to accept Putin’s proposal. Belarus’s balance of trade with Russia in the first half of the year was negative. Export from Belarus to Russia totaled $6 billion, and import to Belarus from Russia was $12.7 billion. The creation of a pool would more closely tie the Belarusian rubles to the Russian one, but there have been several suggestions that Belarus simply convert to the use of the Russian ruble, which Lukashenko rejected. The move would limit the Belarusian National Bank’s ability to regulate macroeconomic processes in the country and require greater transparency of it.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Oct. 07, 2008
|
|
|
