The Russian economy has entered the stage of recovery, its „flywheel” is „unwinding”, and by the end of the year the country should enter certain positive trends, said Maxim Oreshkin, aide to the President of Russia.
“We have now entered the third stage, it is recovery. We managed to achieve stabilization of consumer demand and incomes of citizens, serious decisions were made to support citizens with low incomes, payments to families with children with low incomes were expanded, pensions and social benefits were indexed,” Oreshkin said. , speaking on Saturday at the forum „Territory of Meanings”.
He recalled that the indexation of pensions and social benefits immediately leads to a serious and permanent increase in costs, as demand in stores and services along the chain further begins to spread throughout the economy. “Step by step, we see that the situation is improving. If, for example, the same retail sales in the country as a whole in nominal terms in certain weeks of May-June were lower than last year, now it is an increase of 10-15% compared to last year This means that there are incomes that provide this demand, people spend money, and, accordingly, this is the revenue of Russian business,” he added.
The presidential aide said that the authorities have stepped up work to restore foreign trade – both in terms of logistics and in terms of setting up payments. According to him, there is an active interaction with India, China, Turkey, Indonesia and other countries.
„Therefore, the flywheel of the economy is slowly spinning up, lending volumes are increasing, interest rates are falling – we see that the loan portfolios of banks are already growing step by step, in the most difficult periods of April-May they even decreased in some weeks. All this indicates that the flywheel the economy has started to work, and by the end of the year we should already reach certain positive trends,” Oreshkin is sure. „The Central Bank has softened its monetary policy, the interest rate has been falling, now the Central Bank promises that a decision to further reduce interest rates will also be considered at the meeting on July 22,” Oreshkin said.
He emphasized that it is necessary to ensure long-term changes in the economy in the new conditions of technological and financial restrictions against Russia. Among the principles of building a new economy, he named openness and stressed that Russia is not going to close and intends to work with all interested partners. The presidential aide noted that the second principle is reliance on private initiative.
Among other priorities of the authorities, according to Oreshkin, are ensuring social justice and the growth of incomes of the population, the transition to a new budget policy, and the growth of infrastructure spending. “The main task, the key task is to build a sovereign economy, that is, an economy that is confident in its own strength, self-confident, works with any partners, but at the same time does not depend on and is invulnerable from them,” Oreshkin explained.