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The exchange rate of Russian Ruble against international currencies

 

the russian ruble against international currencies















The ruble is the official currency of the Russian bear


The Russian ruble is the official national currency of the Russian Federation, and a unit called the kopek is subdivided from it, where each ruble is equivalent to one hundred kopeks. The ruble is denoted by the drawing or by the symbol "RUB" approved by the International Organization for Standardization.


The origins of the Russian ruble

The origins of the Russian ruble go back to the 13th century, when the word ruble was used for the first time in the Novgorod Principality (one of the cities in northwestern Russia) to denote ingots made of silver (about two hundred grams, which were divided into several pieces for circulation among people as money, instead of leather). And animal fur used before that date.


The name of the ruble was derived from the word "ruble", which means cracks, due to the fact that the silver alloy had cracks that allowed it to be easily divided into pieces, and used in performance operations.


The ruble remained poorly circulated among the people due to its high value, as one ingot was enough to buy an entire herd of cows, for example. Most people were forced to use foreign coins as a substitute until the beginning of the 18th century, when Czar Peter I (or the Great) issued small silver coins in 1704.

bank notes

The ruble was issued in the form of bank notes at the beginning of the 19th century in order to facilitate monetary circulation, and the Russians used silver coins and bank notes together in their financial dealings. However, the intensive issuance of these papers by the Central Bank for the purpose of financing the growing spending of the state led to a rapid decline in the value of these papers after the middle of the 19th century.


In 1897, like the rest of the powers in Europe, the authorities replaced the silver ruble pieces with other gold coins. But the golden ruble disappeared from circulation with the beginning of the First World War, and bank notes became inconvertible to gold or silver.


During the civil war, after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, Russia experienced a wild inflation that led to the collapse of the ruble’s value again. The communists tried to abolish money, believing that continuing to use it would hinder the establishment of a class-free society, and they thought that people could dispense with it.


But the emergence of several local currencies in different parts of the country prompted the ruling regime to carry out monetary reform and return the ruble to circulation from 1932, and it became known as the Soviet ruble until the collapse of the Soviet Union.


The Russian ruble was adopted as the new official currency of the Russian Federation in 1992, and its value was very weak compared to the Soviet period, where one dollar was equivalent to more than five thousand rubles, and the price of the newspaper, for example, was up to eight hundred rubles.


Russia went through a severe economic crisis in 1997 and 1998 that deepened the ruble's problems, forcing the authorities to issue a new ruble equivalent to a thousand old rubles.

crises

The ruble has experienced a crisis since 2014, when its value began to collapse against other currencies, as the euro, for example, reached a hundred rubles on December 16, 2014.


The value of the ruble fluctuated over the subsequent months, between rise and fall. After the euro fell to less than seventy rubles in November 2015, it rose again to more than ninety rubles in February 2016, and then declined again.


On the one hand, the causes of this crisis are due to the economic sanctions imposed by the West on Russia, following the conflict in Ukraine and the secession of Crimea from it. These sanctions have negatively affected Russian exports to the European Union and the flow of foreign investments to Russia.


These sanctions also contributed significantly to the decline in the amounts of hard currency entering the country in return for an increase in the amount of money that left Russian soil (withdrawal of investments and bank deposits).


On the other hand, the ruble crisis in 2016 is due to a significant drop in oil prices since mid-2014, in a country whose exports are mainly based on the hydrocarbon sector (oil and natural gas) and whose economy suffers from a lack of diversification.


This reflected negatively on the state's foreign exchange revenues, in contrast to the increasing need to develop foreign exchange reserves to meet the increasing demand due to the high imports of Russian households and companies of consumer and equipment goods.


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