The ruble fell 38 points to 3,705 per U.S. dollar in moderate trading on the Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange. Initial demand for dollars was $163.37 million, down from more than $360 million last Thursday, when the ruble lost 52 points against the U.S. currency.
According to Interfax, the Central Bank spent some $60 million to support the ruble Tuesday.
"The situation is totally controlled by the Central Bank," said Nikolai Dudin, chief dealer with Tveruniversalbank. "There won't be any extraordinary situations for a while."
Dudin said that after the Oct. 11 "Black Tuesday" crash, when the ruble fell by 825 points in a single day, the Central Bank had been working actively on the private interbank market trying to level demand for dollars.
Nonetheless, the ruble's value in private interbank deals continued to differ from the official exchange rate Tuesday evening. The Russian currency traded at 3,782 per dollar in deals for Wednesday, according to Andrei Tenyatov, a Most-Bank dealer.
But Tenyatov agreed with Dudin that the ruble would not fall sharply in the immediate future.
"The panic wave caused by the events in Chechnya has passed," he said, adding that the dollar market had lost its speculative value compared to interbank credits. Annualized interest rates on interbank credits now range from about 110 percent for a one-day loan to 180 percent for a three-month loan.
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