by Edward Hugh: Barcelonabr /br /According to Deputy Economic Development Minister Andrei Klepach last week, Russia's economy shrank by 7 percent year on year in the first quarter of 2009, a staggering turnaround for an economy which has just enjoyed eight years of solid oil-fueled growth.br /br /"These figures are worse than we expected," Klepach said at a press conference in Kiev,citing preliminary figures. Klepach also stated that net capital outflows reached $33 billion in the first quarter of 2009, following record outflows of $130 billion in the second half of last year.br /br /pa href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ngczZkrw340/SdsTJmo57XI/AAAAAAAANbI/gYR1beR2NiI/s1600-h/russia+gdp.png"img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5321868440380239218" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 400px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 229px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ngczZkrw340/SdsTJmo57XI/AAAAAAAANbI/gYR1beR2NiI/s400/russia+gdp.png" border="0" //abr /br /The Russian State Statistics Service have also released official gross domestic product figures for the fourth quarter of 2008. GDP was up 1.2 percent year on year, the worst reading for any quarter since ...

blockquote“A significant amount, if not all, of the speculative attacks on the ruble are funded by the central bank itself,” said Vladimir Osakovsky, Moscow-based economist for UniCredit/blockquotepThe underlying dynamics of the current ruble devaluation are provoking more than a little consternation in Russia at the moment. In the forefront of the debate are data from Bank Rossii (the central bank) which show they lent 7.7 trillion rubles ($214 billion) in overnight and seven-day loans (secured with bonds or other collateral) in just 16 trading days last month - this was about double the 4.8 trillion rubles provided via so-called repurchase auctions in December. Over the same period the ruble lost 18 percent against the dollar. The question is, is there a connection here?/ppRussia's banking authorities now certainly seem to think there is and Kommersant reported (Friday) that policy makers planned to reduce bank loans in an attempt to limit ...