Russia’s central bank to hold extraordinary meeting after rouble falls to 16-month low

Russia’s central bank has announced it will hold an extraordinary meeting on Tuesday to discuss the level of its key interest rate after the rouble fell to its weakest point in almost 17 months.

The currency has been steadily losing value since the beginning of the year and slid past the psychologically important level of 100 to the dollar on Monday morning.

It has weakened by 26% this year as a result of a collapse in export revenues and growing military spending, making it the third worst-performing global currency in 2023. The decline has led to calls from senior Kremlin officials for higher borrowing costs.

Erdoğan calls Putin as Turkish currency tumbles

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan spoke by phone with Vladimir Putin to discuss “trade and economic cooperation,” the Kremlin said Friday, as the Turkish lira tumbled and Donald Trump said he would ramp up tarriffs against Ankara.

The statement will fuel speculation that Erdoğan is moving closer to Russia as relations worsen between Turkey and the United States, even though both countries are NATO members.

Big Banks Plead Guilty To Market Manipulation, Will Pay $5.8 Billion

The age of multibillion-dollar bank fines with no admission of wrongdoing is over. The Justice Department announced Wednesday morning that five banks pleaded guilty to market manipulation, while also paying billions of dollars in fines.

Barclays, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan and the Royal Bank of Scotland admitted to illegally distorting foreign exchange markets. The banks formed what they called "The Cartel" and aimed to set a key currency marker, known as "the fix," at mutually beneficial values.

Everything is Rigged, Vol. 9,713: This Time, It's Currencies

I'll get into this in more detail later (I'm on deadline for a magazine feature), but this story just landed. Given the LIBOR story, the Interest Rate Swap manipulation story, the Euro gas price manipulation story, the U.S. energy price manipulation story, and (by now) countless others of the "Everything is Rigged" variety, this screams out for immediate notice. Via Bloomberg:

    Traders at some of the world's biggest banks manipulated benchmark foreign-exchange rates used to set the value of trillions of dollars of investments, according to five dealers with knowledge of the practice . . .

Traders Manipulated Currency Rates To Profit Off Clients

To the long and growing list of global markets subject to wanton manipulation by traders, including interest rates, derivatives, gold and oil, we can now add the currency market.

Traders at banks around the world have regularly worked together for "at least a decade" to move a key benchmark currency rate in ways that profit them and hurt their clients, Bloomberg reports, citing anonymous former traders.

Currency Seizures At Canadian Border: Chinese Cash Accounts For 59% Of All Seizures, Report Says

Chinese nationals are bringing illicit cash into the country by the briefcase, and at least some of it is ending up in Canada’s real estate market, according to a news report.

Canada Border Services Agency data obtained by the Wall Street Journal shows cash seizures from Chinese citizens accounted for 59 per cent of all the currency seized at Canada’s two busiest airports, in Toronto and Vancouver, from April 2011 to June 2012.

New $20 banknote costs Bank of Canada a pretty penny

OTTAWA — The Bank of Canada spent a sizable sum of taxpayer green to unveil its new green $20 banknote.

Canada’s central bank spent the equivalent of nearly 2,000 new $20 bills — or close to $40,000 in total — to announce the new polymer banknote and display a seven-storey image of it on the Bank of Canada’s headquarters in downtown Ottawa, reveal new documents obtained by Postmedia News under access to information legislation.

Step one in Canada’s quest for world domination

is to take over Iceland:

For 150 years, no country has expressed interest in adopting the Canadian dollar — the poor cousin to the coveted greenback. But now tiny Iceland, still reeling from the aftershocks of the devastating collapse of its banks in 2008, is looking longingly to the loonie as the salvation from wild economic gyrations and suffocating capital controls.

More seriously, Iceland wouldn’t be the first country to unilaterally adopt another country’s currency: Ecuador abandoned the sucre and adopted the U.S. dollar in 2000 (which not only restored financial stability, but turned the tiny country into a soccer powerhouse). And it’s hard to see why Canada would mind. The danger for Iceland is that it hands over control of its monetary policy to another country’s central bank. As we’ve seen with the euro, that doesn’t always end well.

Original Article
Source: washington post
Author: Brad Plumer 

Banknotables: a holiday conversation starter

Hilarity! Both of the metropolitan broadsheets in Alberta are throwing a tantrum about the Mint’s plans to dump the Famous Five feminists of the 1920s from the $50 bill and replace them with a picture of an icebreaker. Like most pundits who take a thwack at the occasional issue of personages and emblems on our currency, the authors of these editorials act like they have never been east of Flin Flon.

I ask you to sincerely disregard the epic loathsomeness of the Famous Five—that quintet of unsmiling prohibitionists, pacifists, and white supremacists, at least three of whom bear direct personal responsibility for a four-decade regime of sexual sterilization of the “unfit” in Alberta. Leave aside, too, the fact that women would obviously have been admitted to the Senate soon enough if there had never been a Persons Case. No, I ask you merely to look at the people other countries put on their paper currency. With the exception of Australia, which shares our fetish for early female politicians utterly unknown elsewhere, you’ll find they mostly like to put world-historical figures on there. Japan honours Noguchi, who discovered the syphilis spirochete. England honours Darwin and Adam Smith. Sweden remembers Linnaeus and Jenny Lind. New Zealand commemorates Edmund Hillary and Ernest Rutherford.