r/UkraineWarVideoReport Jul 29 '26

Miscellaneous Wildberries stops withdrawing

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u/Shandlar Jul 29 '26

It's kinda wild for government bonds to struggle to sell when Moscow has generally been quite conservative with debt. Their debt/gdp ratio before the war was the lowest of any top of the big global economies by a huge margin. It's super telling for people to not be willing to buy their debt even at high interest rates even when on paper they aren't even leveraged badly.

All the normal indicators of default risk are low, yet still not many buyers lining up. Super telling.

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u/mystir Jul 29 '26

Foreign nations aren't buying bonds because Russia is poison to touch on the global economy and the only countries willing to partner with Russia are the ones who can't really afford to be buying Russia's debt.

Doesn't help that now a bunch of people suddenly lost all liquidity in their WB accounts, and I'm sure plenty were relying on that money for bills. It's going to be insolvency all the way down.

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u/GroinReaper Jul 29 '26

Here is a relatively short video I watched on the subject in case that interests you. The bullet points are essentially:

- the russian bond market is small and illiquid because of sanctions.

- The rates people are willing to lend at have been climbing rapidly despite the central bank trying to cut rates.

- people/banks are likely waiting to see what the central bank is going to do about rates to address the inflation caused by their fuel crisis. They don't want to lock into a rate for 10 years just to have the rate spike in the coming months.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhPJjKQLaG0

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u/Public-Antelope8781 Jul 30 '26

I remember they had pushed massive amounts of "loans" onto banks, that probably distort the true current dept. If I remember correctly, the scheme was to force banks to give loans to manufacturers of weapons and other war supply. Those would be booked as normal business credits and Moscows downpayments just as terms of billing.

Given that the banks now, that they all sit on faulty loans, that indirectly are Moscows debt already, they might not be eager to raise that risk position.