Russia hikes interest rates to 15% as inflation soars

alphacyberranger@lemmy.world to World News@lemmy.world – 426 points –
Russia hikes interest rates to 15% as inflation soars
bbc.com
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It's always so strange to me that we don't see the same bombastic support from the tankies over news like this, surely this is another genius move which underscores the futility of Western sanctions, right? Another 5d chess move to bring Ukraine to it's knees, or dismantle the petrodollar, surely? šŸ™ƒ

You think the kids that sat at the back of the classroom, saying learning math is a waste of time because they'll never need to use it, can form an opinion on this? They see the words "interest rate" and decide this news is completely irrelevant because they can't understand it.

you are aware russia hasnt been socialist for decades right?

russia is a failed proto-fascist state.

Yes, they're aware. They're also aware that ML types will support Russia regardless, because no evil is too great so long as it even mildly inconveniences the West.

thats because we cant compare the evil of the west with russia.

further entrenching US power is really bad for everyone not on the west.

Seems pretty good for all of the neighbour-states of the other powers

But you guys are always making everything about the US, further entrenching US soft power.

They arenā€™t different today than they were then

now thats just false

Government controlled oligarchary

failed proto-fascist state

The USSR was both of those, you can say it was socialist under Lenin if you want but it was just a corporation trying to run everything

Hard for them to respond after they were all banned from Lemmy.world. Really easy to be smug when you have no opposition lol.

In case people are unaware, limmy.world defederated from the two major Tanky instances (Lemmygrad for Russian supporters and Hexbear for Chinese supporters). I'm not really sure why the above comment is downvoted. It's basically correct, though using the wrong terms.

.ml is plenty tankie too.

.ml is much more general leftist than tankie imo. There's plenty of talkies on there, but also many non-tankies. Definitely still a much higher rate than irl tho.

"Everything I don't like is woke tankie"

They're aware but they still foam at the mouth over imaginary enemies and will downvote anything that stands counter to their crusade.

Thanks for the background. I knew there was some defederation going on but didnā€™t realize it was so political. Somewhat disappointing tbh

Bro people is with the jews now, they provide more impactful videos

Are the tankies in the room with you right now?

This joke's getting as stale as the "attack helicopter" shit your alt-right counterparts say.

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Not on this instance since defederation, thankfully. Doesnā€™t mean they cease to exist

Defederation? What happened?

Lemmy.world defederated from hexbear and lemmygrad which are the two largest tankie instances. Defederation is essentially an instancewide ban. In practice this means that any users on Lemmy.world cannot see any posts, comments, or communities from either of those instances.

That explains the substantial improvement in my mood lately.

It happened quite a while ago, but I'm glad you're feeling better.

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The Bank of Russia, the country's central bank, has now raised rates by 7.5 percentage points since July

Holy crap, 7.5% in (basically) 1 quarter. Imagine trying to buy a house and having your loan repayment amount jumping faster than you can get paperwork filed.

So your comment made me go "lol, imagine buying a house in Russia." Meaning my preconceptions were that most in Russia didn't have the means to own a home.

But then I'm like, I don't actually know that, let's check it out.

According to this site home ownership in Russia is over 90%. So what you outlined is a real problem for people there, and changes some of my mental picture of Russian life.

The more you know!

I suppose 30 years of mostly declining population has probably significantly reduced the pressure on the housing supply

I still have question how even stagnated population would even pressure housing supply at all.

I was wondering the same thing for Germany, our population is stagnating, but apparently we need 400,000 new apartments per year (according to our government). Maybe because there are more divorces and singles nowadays who want to live alone?

Germany's population has actually increased by almost four million in the past ten years, so that number of new apartments seems pretty reasonable at the moment. There will always be some homes that need replaced each year too, if they become unsuitable for living or are converted to non-residential purposes

You are right, maybe the y-axis of the diagram I remember was scaled for a larger range and it looked like it was stagnating, but with those numbers it really seems reasonable.

The numbers for Germany do often look weird after reuinification. In 2011 Germany realised it actually had 1.5 million fewer people than it thought it did. It hadn't actually done a full census since reunification, and over 24 years in the west and 30 years in the east plus the difficulty of combining the two sets of records, errors built up

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90% sounds really high? At least compared to the states where it seems a vast majority is renting??

No idea the data on this, just going off my anecdotal experience.

Everything was owned by the state during Soviet times. Then the people got the chance to privatise their homes for pennies. Now everyone is an owner. That happened to all countries which were a part of USSR, not just Russia. Renting is a very weird concept over there. You only rent if: you travel a lot for work, you're a poor student in a different city and your uni didn't provide accommodation, or you're an alcoholic who lost their home.

Source: born and raised in USSR.

I was surprised as well. It would be worth confirming the dates from a second source, but there are some ready possible explanations for it as well. It could show a large number of multigenerational households. It could relate to the distribution of the population in high and low cost areas (rural vs urban likely). So it does seem high, but not impossible.

Cheers!

Another large factor is that it was communism up until relatively recently. Meaning wealth was largely evenly distributed outside the very top of the party. Not that people were well off, but far more equal than we are in the west. And while the oligarchs have an extremely outsized percentage of all Russian wealth buying real estate would make little sense in Russia, that would 1) put their position in Russia in danger by painting a target on them 2) a horrible hedge given Russia isn't the most stable economy. In total I think 90% sounds extremely reasonable. Though the average house standard is of course far lower than say Germany.

That seems reasonable. I also think it stems from my idea of ownership being a standalone house, and didn't include things like owned apartments, flats, condos, etc that would make up a large state of ownership in big cities.

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Hold on, 90%? I guess that would include the whole family in the home as the home owners, because otherwise that is an insane amount of single occupant dwellings.

This number aligns with my personal experience

If home ownership is 90% that doesnā€™t sound like a big problem for the country. If only 10% are renting or looking I canā€™t imagine that would have much of an impact on prices with demand being so low. Business investment is a problem for sure

People have children and need to get a bigger place. Or their children grow up and move out, so they downsize.

Higher interest rates keep people in places that don't fit them because it's more expensive to change.

I have no clue but thatā€™s only true for a growing population. Last time I checked they have a diminishing population with not that much immigration. So if every time someone dies they leave the house to their child - no money required. Again all assumptions

Uh ok. Yeah that will work... in thirty years. Most people don't have someone dying and leaving them a house every few years.

Itā€™s net housing, plenty of young people going off to die wonā€™t be needing a house, lots of empty houses from people leaving the country through brain drain. Lots of people dying well before their kids grow up requiring a house. Yes some young people will need homes but thereā€™s more than enough supply to keep the price low enough that the interest rate doesnā€™t bite as hard as interest on a large principle plus this impacts less than 10% of the population then assume many of the 10% is happy to rent so I donā€™t know ~ 5% of the population might want to buy a house and some of this 5% would have the means to do so even with higher rates so itā€™s even less again

You don't understand. With high interest rates, no one wants to move because their home mortgage will be higher even on a smaller place.

You donā€™t understand. If you own your home why do you need to move? And if you do need to downsize how will higher rates increase the burden if the principle is decreasing? Do you have a degree in macro economics? Because I dont

I just explained it to you:

People have children and need to get a bigger place. Or their children grow up and move out, so they downsize.

Yes, higher rates will increase your payment even if the principal is lower.

A $300K 30 year mortgage (paying 20% down) at 3.25% costs $1044 per month. The same mortgage at 6.25% costs $1477 per month. 15% is $3034 per month. At 15% you can afford half as much house as at 6.25%, and a third as much as 3.25%

https://www.bankrate.com/mortgages/mortgage-calculator/

Also, you will get less equity for your house when you sell because other people can't afford a larger loan (because their payments go up too). That's the purpose of high interest rates; they prevent people from borrowing money.

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Offtopic (because it has nothing to do with Russia): in Argentina the inflation of the local currency this year reached at least 100% annual.

But people there use USD fiat for purchasing real estate. And use USD/EUR for saving.

So even if the local currency is a mess, people moves using foreign currency for important transactions.

The Bank of Russia (back when things were so bad they had to halt their stock market) has also forbid people for using more than small amounts of foreign currency. I believe people are limited to the equivalent of 10,000 rubles, or $100 per week.

I mean you would be really dumb for having a variable rate loan.

I wasn't talking about variable rate loans. I mean by the time you started the process of getting the loan there'd be one interest rate and one expected repayment amount; and by the time you got to signing and locking in the rate it would probably have gone up by about a point and half at that rate.

Oh yeah for sure. Gotcha. Yeah I bought a house a year ago, and the rate was 5.5% when I started looking. Went up to 6% by the time I found the house and locked it in. That half percent actually represented a lot of money.

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Part of me is hopeful that this means something will eventually break, but it's also hard to get past some of the initial predictions I was reading when the war first started, that Russia couldn't keep up the war longer than a few months, that Russia was going to collapse at almost any moment. Now it seems like Russia is converting to a permanent wartime economy and that this thing is expected to drag on for years to come. It makes me wonder, even when Putin eventually dies, does Russia just continue on with the war out of sheer momentum, because the next person knows what a shitshow things will turn into if they try to end the war?

when Putin eventually dies, does Russia just continue on with the war out of sheer momentum

My prediction that in such event war will just stop, Shulman's prediction is war will be immidiately forgotten as mass delirium.

"Time will come when Putin's mansions will be shown on federal TV".

I'd love someone knowledgable enough to chime in on this.

I think Ekatering Shulman has some videos about war for english-speaking audience.

Though she talks about social and political aspects, not economical.

Not sure this is going to help much when the ruble is tanking internationally, state reserves are frozen, sanctions are still taking effect, and property is being seized from oligarchs, all while a misguided war is being waged at full tilt. Pretty sure it's just putting more pressure on the wrong parts of the economy that are already about to break. But, I'm no economist and Russia's gonna Russia, so whatever.

and property is being seized from oligarchs

Not sure why this is mentioned as tanking ruble.

Fuck ā€˜em.

Working in logistics I asked my boss a few weeks ago to which of our internal geo clusters does Russia belong to, and he replied exactly "to the fuck 'em cluster". Happily agreed with that statement.

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Russia's central bank has put up its key interest rate to 15% to try to curb inflation and bolster a weak rouble.

The higher-than-expected rate hike of two percentage points raises borrowing costs for the fourth time in a row.

This includes an unscheduled emergency hike in August as the rouble tumbled past 100 to the dollar and the Kremlin called for tighter monetary policy.

Pressure has also been mounting on the Russian economy due to imports rising faster than exports and military spending growing for the Ukraine war.

But rate hikes can only go so far in steadying an economy, and analysts have said Russia could struggle to attract investment due to Western sanctions.

EU leaders introduced a price cap plan to limit the amount Russia earns from its oil exports and the country has also been excluded from Swift, an international payment system used by thousands of financial institutions.


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