SberCIB predicted the dollar at RUB 65 due to the resumption of the budget rule, and experts assessed the impact of problems with oil sales on the Russian budget – these and other important news for Friday morning, January 13, in our daily review.

The Finance Ministry’s decision to start selling yuan as part of the budget rule will reduce the pressure on the ruble from the fall in Russian oil prices, and the dollar exchange rate may fall to 65 rubles in January, the yuan exchange rate – to 9.5 rubles, CberCIB analysts said. Currency sales will be able to largely offset the drop in oil and oil product exports, experts point out. The Finance Ministry potentially has the equivalent of about $100 billion in yuan, CberCIB noted.

The projected oil and gas revenues of the Russian federal budget in the first month of 2023 will be less than the baseline (corresponding to moderately conservative scenarios of oil sector conditions with a stable ruble exchange rate), the Ministry of Finance said on January 11. This will happen for the first time since December of pandemic 2020. The shortfall in oil and gas revenues relative to the base level according to the budget rule should be compensated from the National Welfare Fund (NWF), RBC writes.

After the decision to impose a price embargo on Russian oil and oil products transported by sea, the West is looking for a substitute for Russian fuel. As Bloomberg writes, the most important factor in this process may be fuel supplies from China.

Most of the transactions on the largest platforms for trading cryptocurrency are manipulative transactions of groups of related owners. This conclusion was reached by the authors of a joint U.S.-Chinese study of so-called wash trading on crypto exchanges, writes “Kommersant” with reference to the publication of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER – a non-profit organization in the United States).

Bitcoin on Thursday, January 12, rose in price to the level of November 2022, exceeding $19,000. The market believes that the worst is over for the cryptocurrency, experts interviewed by CNBC assessed the situation with the bitcoin rate. The world’s largest cryptocurrency by capitalization has been rising since early January, but its price is 74% below its peak of $68,990, the record high of November 2021, the channel reports.