By RIA Novosti
Moscow : The current turmoil in the global financial markets may impair development opportunities for Russia’s major exporters of raw materials, the chief of Russian industry representative organisation said Thursday.
“The liquidity crisis in the US economy could affect Russian companies’ ability to finance large-scale projects requiring stable volumes of commodity exports,” Alexander Shokhin, president of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, said.
He said their export revenues could decline, thus limiting their ability to modernise and forcing them to review their merging and acquisition plans.
However, he said the crisis does not threaten Russia’s economy as a whole, since it has a sufficient safety margin in the form of the Stabilization Fund and foreign exchange reserves.
On Wednesday, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin called Russia a “haven of stability”, as the country’s economy remained stable amid slumping global stock markets, and said that Moscow could offer financial assistance to the international community.
“As a country with substantial reserves, Russia could help soothe the global crisis,” the minister said.
World stock exchanges have seen heightened volatility in recent weeks following the financial difficulties provoked by the US subprime mortgage crisis and fresh signs of a recession in the world’s largest economy.
The largest US banks earlier announced that they would seek to raise equity abroad to shore up their liquidity.
Russia’s Stabilization Fund, established to take in revenues from oil and gas exports and absorb excessive liquidity, stood at $157 billion (3.85 trillion rubles) as of Jan 1, 2008, compared to $89.1 billion (2.35 trillion rubles) a year earlier.
The Russian Trading System (RTS) index gained 1.83 percent during Wednesday morning’s trade to 2,003.65 points, regaining most of the losses sustained in the past two days when it plunged 7.38 percent from Friday’s close to below 2,000 Monday afternoon, and fell another 5.83 percent to below 1,900 points Tuesday morning.
However, the index was given a boost by the United States Federal Reserve’s decision to slash its interest rate by three quarters of a percentage point Tuesday, in an emergency move to attempt to avoid a US economic recession.