俄罗斯将从经济危机中康复吗？

在莫斯科三个评级机构在莫斯科大三个评级机构监测了公司信贷的俄罗斯分析师仍然保持了Go-Go-Go的习惯，

enjoying a steak tartare lunch at a plush restaurant just off the capital’s Garden Ring, but his outlook for the country is grim — and not only in economic terms. He worries about the official media’s increasing focus on a “fifth column” supposedly seeking to undermine Russia from within, and about events like the 35,000-strong February march in Moscow, encouraged by the government, that was directed against “internal enemies.” Such efforts to stifle dissent and rally support for the government’s policies toward Ukraine could metastasize into a modern version of Stalinism, he warns.

“在这个国家的生活空间正在缔约，”分析师说，一起用手。“我们必须记住俄罗斯在历史上的任何其他国家都有更多的公民。”他补充说，他正在考虑移到加拿大，他有亲戚。

A British banker who has lived in Moscow since the 1990s sips a double cappuccino amid a bustling after-work crowd at the Taganka Square branch of Le Pain Quotidien, a Belgian café chain that has mushroomed around the capital in recent years. Laid off from a Western-backed hedge fund that is shrinking its operations in Russia, he is having his apartment valued and mulling starting over again in London.

Marina Treshchova, the fireball CEO of Moscow-based Internet incubator Fastlane Ventures, used to stay late at the office poring over business plans when she wasn’t racking up air miles calling on investors from Boston to Berlin. Now she is finding more time for the quieter joys of caring for her two young children. “The requirements of managing our portfolio right now allow me to work from home a lot more,” she says in a subdued tone.

A visit to Moscow offers little evidence to support the assertion of U.S. President Barack Obama that Russia’s economy is “in tatters,” but neither does it back up the argument of President弗拉基米尔普京俄罗斯击中了底部，并准备恢复。主要市场指标在2015年看到了一个谦虚的反弹，俄罗斯股20年4月20日的俄罗斯股价上涨了20.5％。卢布在2014年失去了几半的价值后稳定了稳定。

“I’m very optimistic about the future of Russia,” veteran investor Jim Rogers said last month at a Moscow conference organized by Russia’s top stock brokerage, BCS Financial Group. “Certainly, one of the most attractive stock markets in the world for me these days is Russia.”

在公司俄罗斯本身，这种乐观难以找到。该国的实体经济持续恶化：根据国际货币基金组织，2014年推出仅0.6％后，经济将在今年减少3.8％，并将继续缩减到2016年，禁止油价意外上涨。通货膨胀的年增长率超过15％，意味着国有银行巨头的首席经济学家Yulia Tseplyaeva估计，实际工资将下降10％Sberbank.。企业贷款已尖叫到近空停止，国内主要利率为14％，外国信贷额主要通过制裁窒息。失业率达到历史新高的历史率低4.8％，于3月份增加到5.9％，几乎肯定会进一步上升，经济学家和高管表示。政府宣布，该政府正在修改2015年的预算，将联邦支出削减2％，并将从储备基金中退出3.1万亿卢布（585亿美元），其中两个大熊队储备之一，以支持支出和限制升值预算赤字。“危机的全部效果将在未来三到六个月内感受到未来三到六个月，”BCS首席经济学家Vladimir Tikhomirov说。

如果和衰退结束，分析师，投资者和商业主管港口很少希望有力的康复。这油价急剧下降— Russia’s chief export — and sanctions imposed by the European Union and the U.S. in retaliation for Russia’s annexation of Crimea and perceived proxy war in eastern Ukraine have taken a big toll on the economy. Even before those recent woes, however, the economy had been slowing sharply from the combined impact of long-standing bureaucracy and corruption and the waning of an unsustainable boom in corporate and consumer credit. “It’s easy to forget now that we grew just 1.3 percent in 2013, when Brent oil averaged more than $100 a barrel,” notes Tseplyaeva.

Getting Russian growth back up to the average global rate of 3.5 to 4 percent, a level the country easily exceeded for much of the past decade, would require substantial improvement in all of those trends, market participants say. For now that looks unlikely. The U.S. Energy Information Administration forecasts that Brent crude will average $59.50 a barrel this year — up from the recent lows but slightly below its late-April level of $62.77 — then rise to $75 in 2016. Although that would be a welcome recovery, such prices would hardly put the Russian economy back on steroids. On the geopolitical front Putin seems more inclined to escalate tensions in Ukraine than make concessions and to maintain a broader war of nerves with the West that has resulted in nuclear-armed Russian bombers regularly cruising off the coasts of the U.K. and Norway. And in his 15th year of what has become near-absolute power, Putin shows no sign of embracing the deep structural reform that’s needed to invigorate the economy.

这consensus outlook, then, is for a sort of permanent crisis that will erode Russia’s economic health even as Putin seeks to reclaim the country’s big-power status. “We should be prepared that the current environment of sluggish or negative growth will continue for quite some time,” says Alexey Kornya, chief financial officer of Russia’s top cellular carrier, Mobile TeleSystems. “This is the new normal.”

“WHAT I FEEL FROM GOVERNMENT officials is a lot of complacency,” says Viatcheslav Pivovarov, a former adviser to Russia’s Ministry of Economic Development and Trade who now runs a $50 million hedge fund firm, Altera Capital, in Moscow. “They assume oil will go back up eventually and they can muddle through until then.”

普京和他的中尉有充分的理由不要恐慌或匆匆在乌克兰解决解决方案：在大量的石油价格上仍然有一个大量的金融缓冲区，尽管他们已经迅速排出了这些资源。这俄罗斯中央银行（CBR）储备3.56亿美元，从2011年8月的54.5亿美元下降。政府在两个下雨天，国家福利基金和储备基金中额外收取1490亿美元，但预算下降将缩小后者基金在今年年初到其规模的三分之一。最后，政权可以依赖于现在愿意，如果不渴望，以爱国主义的名义牺牲的人口。

对普京的真正支持可能不会与经常引用的85％左右的批准额定值一样高。这是一个难得的俄罗斯谁，将在电话中表达陌生人陌生人。但大多数大多数明确赞同官方观点，即去年的乌克兰革命从美国支持的情节蔓延到围绕俄罗斯，他们似乎相信莫斯科的回应是确保国家安全所需的最低要求。

作为美国承包商刷新的员工，俄罗斯政策激起了西方的经济制裁的想法，这位莫斯科工程师已经超过十年。“这是你把你放在一起的一些阴谋，”他说。A senior banker breaks off a dry discussion of loan-loss provisions and capital ratios for a disquisition on the Crimean War — not the Russian seizure of that territory last year but the conflict of 1853–’56, in which Britain and France bombarded the cities of Odessa and Sevastopol and defeated Russia’s bid to project military power across the Black Sea. “If it weren’t for our nuclear weapons, they would be bombing Moscow now,” he concludes.

这些民族主义的热情让俄罗斯政策制定者让俄罗斯政策制定者易于让卢布drop broadly in line with oil prices, then resort to shock-and-awe rate hikes to support the currency without much fear of popular discontent, analysts say. So far, that policy has worked in several respects.

中央银行比2008年-09的全球金融危机更有效地保护了火力。从2014年7月至2015年3月，CBR将其储备耗尽了1250亿美元，以资助货币干预，支持商业银行，为重额债务巨头Rosneft提供有争议的佣金贷款保障。这比2008年8月六个月内花费的3180亿美元。

这卢布devaluation has cushioned the impact of petroleum prices on Russia’s budget because the state collects key taxes from exporters based on their hard currency earnings, then meets its own bills in rubles. In late March the Duma passed a revised 2015 budget calling for a reduction in spending, to R15.2 trillion this year, and a deficit of 3.7 percent of gross domestic product — profligate by recent Russian standards but well in line with global practice during a downturn. Crucially, the budget math allows Putin to maintain promised increases in the nominal value of pensions and other social payments.

卢布贬值已经纾困，俄罗斯的主要商品行业，价格下跌下跌的损失是通过在家中卢布成本下降的大大抵消。例如，采矿巨头Norilsk镍在2014年报告的成本下降了14％，这有助于提高利息前，税收，折旧和摊销35％，达到57亿美元。诺里尔斯克等资源泰坦的正现金流动缓解了俄罗斯最紧急的宏观经济问题，偿还了6000亿美元，以便其公司借入外国银行和债券持有人，其中大部分不会滚动这些债务。根据CBR数据，俄罗斯公司在九个月内偿还了九个月内的约1300亿美元的硬币债务，留下了剩下的3季度左右。“债务偿还的关键阶段通过了，”BCS的Tikhomirov说。“卷越来越越来越低，公司正在赚钱。”

俄罗斯公司离岸子公司估计，米哈伊尔Matovnikov，Sberbank的首席分析师，近一半的外国借款。Tikhomirov说，这些交易通常用于税务目的。例如，俄罗斯公司可能以2％的利率向外国子公司借贷，并以7％的单位借款，以减少家庭的宣布收入。

俄罗斯的天空并没有下跌的事实却为某些专家投资者拼写了战术机会。Altera的Pivovarov说他已经提出了

$100 million to invest in the hard currency bonds of Russian issuers. Yields on four-year paper issued by state diamond monopoly Alrosa were trading at about 12 percent last month; some bonds issued by state-owned VTB Bank sport yields as high as 20 percent. Firebird Management, a New York–based hedge fund manager focusing on equities in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, has whittled its Russian exposure from about $1 billion in 2007 to $300 million today but sees ways to profit on what is left.

“Russia these days is a sideways market at best, but from a bottom-up point of view you won’t find an oil company better valued than Lukoil,” says Firebird co-founder Harvey Sawikin, referring to the country’s largest privately owned producer. Lukoil’s London-listed shares have rebounded by one third this year after a similar drop in the second half of 2014. Other Firebird picks include potash producer Uralkali and Sberbank; the latter’s London shares have cratered by 60 percent since the去年2月乌克兰起义。

But the twin currency and credit shocks are taking a vicious toll on the growth industries Russia once looked to for diversification away from raw materials, and they are gradually undermining investment at blue-chip companies. New-car sales fell by roughly half in the first quarter of 2015 from the same period last year. Mass-media ad revenue slumped by one third. Top residential real estate developer Etalon Group slashed its 2015 construction targets by 28 percent in March, to 5.4 million square feet. Commercial rents are dropping precipitously, promising more expensive ghost projects like the Moscow City financial center, whose 70-story towers loom mostly vacant over the Moskva River. “This is a time when you can renegotiate anything with your landlord or suppliers,” says Michael Calvey, senior partner at Baring Vostok Capital Partners, a veteran, Moscow-based private equity investor.

Big players are restraining capital expenditure, too, though more subtly. Cellular power MTS will shave its Russian capex by 9 percent, according to CFO Kornya. That amounts to a real reduction of more than 20 percent after taking inflation into account. “We are struggling to maintain free cash flow and moving to a higher threshold for investment projects,” he says.

At the center of this implosion is a banking system that has effectively become a ward of the state. “The ultimate source of all funding right now is the central bank,” Kornya explains. “Borrowers can use different intermediaries.”

基于狡猾的分析师的蒙斯德·达尼洛夫表示，俄罗斯银行从全球金融崩溃所进入目前的危机仍然弱势。Average capital-to-asset ratios stood at 12 percent, comfortably above the CBR’s 10 percent minimum requirement but down from 16 percent in January 2008. Yet 6 percent of loans were already nonperforming — more than twice the pre-2008 level — when Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych fled Kiev in February 2014.

这situation will only get worse in the next 12 to 18 months, Danilov predicts. NPLs will likely exceed their 2009 peak of 10 percent while rising funding costs are eating into banks’ net interest margins. “The banks could legally raise rates on existing loans, but this is sometimes not possible economically,” he says. Russian banks need to repay their own foreign creditors some $40 billion this year, roughly equal to the amount of liquid hard currency assets they hold, Fitch estimates.

CBR，其他州机关的一些帮助，骑在银行救援。今年早些时候，中央银行宣布一系列专业人士呼吁忍耐措施 - 而局外人可能会致电创意会计 - 将金融机构的书籍致电。Banks may compute the value of hard currency loans, some 20 percent of the system’s portfolio, at the exchange rates that prevailed in the third quarter of 2014. At that time, the ruble traded at about 36 to the dollar, nearly a third below the level of 53.57 to the dollar in late April. By allowing the banks to ignore a large increase in the ruble value of those hard currency loans, the CBR spares them the need to raise fresh capital to back those loans. The regulator extended other forbearance to banks, permitting them to not mark their securities books to market prices and not create provisions for restructured exposures and loans to Ukrainian borrowers.

Direct state support is pouring into the banking system. The CBR and the national development bank, Vnesheconombank, have allowed banks to convert R845 billion in subordinated loans advanced after the 2008–’09 crisis into tier-1 capital. The Deposit Insurance Agency has made an additional R1 trillion available for capital injections to 27 systemically important banks. The CBR has also provided banks with up to $50 billion in repurchase agreements to help companies refinance external debts and pumped up domestic liquidity with increases in collateralized lending.

Overall government funding has swelled to nearly three times its 2009 peak, to some R9 trillion, or 15 percent of the banking system’s liabilities, Fitch says. The net effect is that Russia’s financial heart should be able to keep beating for two years or so while awaiting better weather, Danilov concludes. “Economically, this is a slow-burn situation,” he says.

如果俄罗斯是通过一个简单的commodit痛苦y-crash contraction, two years might well be long enough to restore economic vigor. Oil prices have firmed in recent weeks, with Brent trading at nearly $64 a barrel in late April. A sharp slowdown in consumer spending should help cool inflation and allow the central bank to cut rates. The CBR has already lowered its key rate twice since January, reducing it by a total of 3 percentage points, to 14 percent; Danilov expects it to come down to 10 percent by year-end, below the 10.5 percent rate that prevailed before the Ukraine crisis erupted.

此类货币宽松将为拉长的俄罗斯公司提供欢迎的呼吸障碍，并利用外国投资者回到市场，以利用低资产价格。俄罗斯可以出现一个更加多样化的进口依赖的经济性，并且成本更好地与其生产能力保持一致。然而，由于该国的结构，以及俄罗斯人委婉地呼吁地缘政治，挑战，莫斯科的商业课中，这一玫瑰色的商业课程较薄。

克里姆林宫正在推动进口替代，以实现经济制裁的一种方式。Proposed projects range from the visionary — establishing the Technopolis special economic zone on the grounds of Moscow’s defunct Moskvich auto plant to nurture high-tech companies — to the fanciful: Putin last month ordered officials to consider R972 million in state funding for a proposal, suggested by patriotic film director Nikita Mikhalkov, to create a domestic alternative to McDonald’s called “Let’s Eat at Home.”

俄罗斯已经有一些经验与进口substitution, but the last such example took place under very different conditions, following the country’s 1998 default, Sberbank’s Tseplyaeva notes. Then, wages were low; unemployment was above 10 percent; and more than half of the industrial capacity, dating to the Soviet era, was sitting idle. Today’s Russia has little slack capacity and nearly full employment. “Increasing production for import substitution or anything else requires investment in raising labor productivity,” she points out. That, in turn, requires capital, which is in very short supply right now, and in all likelihood imported machinery and software, which ruble depreciation has made much more expensive. In a January survey by the Moscow-based Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy, 62 percent of Russian managers reported it would be “complicated” to find Russian-made replacements for their foreign-bought inputs. A further 35 percent said the Russian alternatives were of lower quality.

最重要的是，投资需要对未来的信心，今天的俄罗斯不会激励。西方制裁在纸上轻度，禁止超过90天的贷款到不到十几个国家控制的公司。欧盟可能在7月份在近几个月追求克里姆林宫追求的压力时净水措施。但制裁已经扩大到一般金融封锁中，因为没有人知道他在乌克兰未发现的普京和混合军事力将会做什么;俄罗斯总统向自己愿意牺牲他的国家的经济福祉，以恢复其自尊和国际影响范围的更模糊的目标。

Fastlane Ventures基金，帮助消费者购买汽车或访问医疗建议的初创网站远非潜在的制裁目标。然而，俄罗斯孵化器正在依靠第二阶段后盾的美国和欧洲私募股权投资者的网络已经完全枯竭，首席执行官Treeshova说。“没有人知道俄罗斯从现在起三到五年，以及他们是否会发现出口的流动性，”她说。“对我们来说，这是非常痛苦的，因为我们的许多网站都得到了盈亏平衡，并准备好成长为规模。”相反，Fastlane已关闭其16个属性的七个，包括四个站点，专注于房地产。

霸菱Vostok Calvey——曾在俄罗斯since 1994 and made his backers a fortune with an early investment in the country’s dominant Internet search provider,Yandex- 仍然认为他公司的10亿美元现金囤积在全球增长行业等目标，如互联网和医疗保健。“这里的企业家部门就像在大多数地方一样好，”他说。“有一流的人与谁建造企业并做事。”

但CALVEY在目前的估值中毫不急于抓住资产，而是打算在未来三年内打出他的粉末，因为他在莫斯科的国际关系中致以警惕。“我们并不期待有机会窗口到期，”他说。“俄罗斯的政治孤立可能持续很长时间。”

Sergey RiabeLobylko，俄罗斯的俄罗斯全球房地产公司Cushman＆Wakefield的伙伴，采取了更加激动的逆势看跌，敦促投资者迅速舀起俄罗斯俄罗斯房地产而不是以后。“机会窗口在未来六个月内，”他保持。“我们可能已经在2016年期间看到了卷的批量。”但他补充道，“当然，如果我们服用Mariupol，所有的投注都已脱落。”他指的是东乌克兰城市被认为是俄罗斯支持叛乱分子的下一个目标，因为它将在俄罗斯和克里米亚之间开地走廊。

Multinational corporations have longer-term commitments to Russia’s market of 143 million people, the world’s No. 9 economy, with output above $2 trillion, according to the IMF’s 2014 data. But even among big foreign direct investors, the tendency is to retreat. In March, General Motors Co. announced it would terminate Russian auto production, taking a charge of $600 million. Vienna-based Raiffeisen Bank International, the largest foreign bank in Russia, said it would shut 15 branches in the country and slash risk-weighted assets there by 20 percent by 2017. PepsiCo and Coca-Cola Co., Russia’s leading sellers of nonalcoholic beverages, each announced plant closings in March. Danish beer maker Carlsberg, which owns the popular Russian brand Baltika, announced two brewery shutdowns in January.

Although those consumer-oriented investors have been reducing their exposure, French-U.S. oil services giant Schlumberger has showed some confidence in Russia, announcing in January a $1.7 billion deal to acquire 46.45 percent of local competitor Eurasia Drilling Co.

俄罗斯对西方金融冻结的回应乌克兰是东方的宣称枢轴。普京于2014年5月访问了中国，并向他的同胞保证了现金富裕的亚洲人急于将欧洲替换为贷方和投资者。一年后，战略已经承担了小果实。“迈出了公司的第一步是去亚洲市场，但事实证明，亚洲市场非常重点，没有多少动力去其他地方，”BCS的Tikhomirov说。

State gas monopolyGazprom.has yet to line up financing for the signature project of Russia’s intended strategic reboot, a $55 billion drilling and pipeline complex needed to deliver a purported $400 billion worth of gas to China over 30 years. Analysts say the Chinese government is reluctant to advance the cash unless it can obtain stakes in Gazprom’s upstream fields, crown jewels that the Kremlin is not yet ready to pawn. Without Chinese help, sanctioned Gazprom would have to find a way to tap international credit markets again. Compounding Gazprom’s woes, on April 22 the European Commission launched an antitrust case against the company, accusing it of abusing its market dominance to inflate prices and impede rivals.

普京的缩小选项和危机的愈演愈烈cost to ordinary Russians are spurring some faint hopes among economic liberals, who reason that conditions might just get bad enough to catalyze overdue changes. “Now is the best time to start structural reform,” Sberbank’s Tseplyaeva says. “Mr. Gref and the liberal wing of the government are very focused on this,” she adds, referring to Sberbank CEO and former Economic Development minister German Gref.

But the changes she outlines hardly seem adequate to shake Russia out of its lethargic new normal. First priority for the undaunted reformers is restoring the private savings component of the nation’s pension system, which Putin put on moratorium two years ago at the behest of the government’s social bloc, led by the Labor and Healthcare ministries. Gref has also called for a far-reaching but amorphous “reform of public administration” that involves “more cooperation between the federal and regional governments” and key performance indicators “to enhance the efficiency of each bureaucrat,” in Tseplyaeva’s description.

None of these measures would attack Russia’s core problems: grossly inefficient monopolies and lawless bureaucrats who alter the rules of the game at will to enrich connected individuals, starting with the president’s friends.

One thing has not changed in Putin’s Russia. It remains by far the most corrupt of the major emerging markets, according to Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index. Russia ranked 136 out of 175 countries in TI’s 2014 survey, compared with 100 for China, 85 for India and 69 for both Brazil and Turkey.

如果有的话，俄罗斯国家正在争夺其触手，以应对最新的危机。执法部门开始监测去年9月的疑似价格凿孔的食品批发商和零售商，并于3月份普京敦促当局表现出更大的警惕。“经销商和零售商的非婚生行动任意提高其价格必须得到适当的法律反应，”国家负责人在检察官将军办公室讲述了一个学会。这对现在的经济部门来说这是不祥的词语。莫斯科报告的广播电台回声宣布乌拉尔山萨夫罗夫斯克省Sverdlovsk of ural Mountains of Sverdlovsk省的监督省宣布了50个不同的“行政行为”的“行政行为”。

Without some convincing reversal of the Kremlin’s autocratic and kleptocratic habits, a settlement of international tensions over Ukraine or an unexpected leap in oil prices, the prevailing outlook for Russia is for continued economic decline, in relative if not absolute terms. Prosperous democracies like Italy and France can stagnate in a stable fashion for quite some time, with citizens venting their frustrations at the ballot box or in private pursuits. Historically, emerging markets are more volatile, especially when they embark on military adventures.

经济学家Tikhomirov预测，俄罗斯人不会永远侵破他们的腰带以换取乌克兰东部的铁锈腰带的兄弟伪状态。“人们只能在一个想法中保持一致，”他说。“一年前，每个人都对克里米亚的回归感到兴奋;现在这是旧新闻。没有经济改进，到2018年我们可能处于复杂的情况。“俄罗斯的下一届总统选举计划于那年3月。

俄罗斯缓慢的烧伤可能只是变成更大的大火。因为现在它很漂亮。•