‘The recent international liquidity crisis resulted in a major revaluation of the way things work in the international financial system. The crisis was largely brought about by problems some U.S. citizens kept experiencing with making their mortgage payments. Because many of them started making fewer (if any) payments, the bonds that were normally backed up by these mortgages were suddenly devaluated,’ SKB-Bank’s Trading Operations Director Evgeniy Batuyev said to UrBC.

‘As a matter of fact, the problem seems to be of local nature only and is therefore not supposed to affect other national economies. However, the devaluation of the mortgage bonds has already led to many countries’ banks and investment funds incurring some losses or becoming afraid they might do so in the near future. This is primarily true of European businesses. As a result, investors started withdrawing their money from the developing countries’ securities market (and this includes Russia as well),’ Mr. Batuyev said.

‘This couldn’t help worsening the state of events on the Russian interbank loans market; the annual interest on overnight interbank loans rose from 3%-4% to 9%-11%. The Central Bank eased the tension by offering the commercial banks a fairly large amount of money on security of bonds, which made it possible for the Russian banking system to smoothly get past the peak of the crisis. Overall, Russian economy looks good: banks are decreasing their interbank loan interest rates and borrow less from the Central Bank, whereas the stock market is aspiring to get back to where it was,’ Mr. Batuyev noted.