Bloomberg reports that Russia's reserves are down 20 percent after it fought the drop in the ruble:
Russia’s international reserves, which have shrunk by a fifth since last year’s peak, are in the spotlight after the central bank shifted its currency intervention policy as the ruble plunged to a record.
The value of the stockpile has declined for 11 straight weeks, losing $10.5 billion in the seven days through Oct. 31 to $428.6 billion, the central bank said today on its website. The ruble weakened to a record low, depreciating 1.9 percent against the dollar as of 3:17 p.m. in Moscow.
Under new rules announced yesterday, the Bank of Russia can conduct large-scale discretionary interventions to defend against what it deems to be threats to the nation’s financial stability. Such operations will be restricted only by the size of the reserves, central bank First Deputy Governor Ksenia Yudaeva said yesterday. The holdings are now in a “comfortable zone” that allow the regulator to act without any “substantial limits,” she said.
“Clearly they became uncomfortable” with burning through $2 billion to $2.5 billion a day to defend the ruble, Tom Levinson, the chief foreign-exchange and interest-rates strategist at Sberbank CIB, said by phone. “I don’t think they will want to but if they had to they would consider going down to $400 billion.”
As our news desk reports, Putin has urged Russian historians to fight revisionism:
President Vladimir Putin has urged Russian historians to combat what he called attempts to rewrite history based on geopolitical interests by providing their own interpretation of past events.
Speaking to scholars and history teachers on November 5, Putin said that "attempts to reprogram societies of many countries, including our own, are obvious. And this cannot be unrelated to attempts to rewrite history, to tune it to certain geopolitical interests."
"But to prevent this from happening there ought to be people like you -- experts -- who not only inform about the events of the past in an objective and full-fledged manner, but also provide an assessment of them," Putin said.
Russian officials often bristle at criticism of Moscow's actions in the recent and distant past.
Putin took issue with "the Soviet Union being blamed for the division of Poland" in a 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact.
"How about Poland itself? What did it do when the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia? Poland took a chunk of Czechoslovakia for itself," he said, laughing. "And then it got hit back in in return."