Russians took 200 tons of deposits from banks in cash

Since March, Russians have withdrawn cash from banks by almost 200 tons, if we count it in 5,000 denominations, or 1,000 tons in denominations of one thousand rubles each.

Last week, several banks from the backbone system turned to the regulator for an irrevocable credit line. This tool, in fact, is a cash issue to cover the outflow of money of bank depositors. The regulator has already increased the limit on these operations from 1.5 to 5 trillion rubles, and the percentage on them has been reduced first from 0.5% to 0.15%, and then to 0.1%. In total, the five largest banks have already requested regulatory support in the amount of 1.26 trillion rubles. According to the regulator, since March the money supply in the country has increased 10 times compared to last year. People were worried that during the period of the self-isolation regime, banks would not work, and the Russians would be left without money, so they took cash and took deposits.

“The Central Bank pours money into the banking system, as if into a sieve, from which money flows in the form of cash through cash registers and ATMs,” writes finanz.ru .

According to the regulator, Russians massively began to take deposits from banks on the eve of the introduction of restrictive measures in the country, as well as after a statement by Russian President Vladimir Putin about the introduction of a 13% tax on deposit interest: in the third week of March, people took about 616 billion rubles from bank accounts, which amounted to 2% of total deposits. In the last week of March, the outflow of deposits slowed down and even showed a positive trend, which, however, allowed to compensate for only a quarter of the previous outflow.

The head of the Central Bank Elvira Nabiullina urged the Russians not to panic and not to take deposits from Russian banks. According to her, there is no reason for such concern.