Bank of Russia commentary on additional FX market operations using money of National Wealth Fund
Fiscal rule-based foreign exchange transactions with the money of the National Wealth Fund (NWF) are conducted both as part of regular operations to accumulate/spend NWF funds and for other purposes, specifically, for investing NWF funds in eligible ruble-denominated financial assets.
To offset the impact of such operations on macroeconomic and monetary conditions, the Bank of Russia implements an approach whereby all foreign exchange transactions with NWF funds are mirrored by the Bank of Russia in the domestic FX market. With that, to minimise the effect of one-off occasional operations with NWF money on the domestic FX market, the Bank of Russia has decided to set the limit of the daily amount of these operations at the equivalent of 4.0 billion rubles.
Considering this approach and the need to sell foreign currency in the domestic market as part of the Aeroflot stock transaction, starting 26 October 2020, in addition to regular fiscal rule-based operations, the Bank of Russia will sell foreign currency at the daily equivalent of 4.0 billion rubles. This amount also includes the previously announced FX sales associated with the acquisition of the Sberbank stock by the NWF.