Russia restarted trading in federal government bonds (OFZ) on March 21, almost a month after the Moscow Exchange was shut down on Feb. 25 following the invasion of Ukraine.
This essentially means that the Russian central bank will be on standby to purchase government bonds, if the prices dip too low, to prevent the market from experiencing any catastrophic declines. In a bid to neutralize the impact of such bond purchases on monetary policy, the Bank of Russia intends to “subsequently sell the entire portfolio of these bonds.” The bank did not specify how much it was willing to spend on buying government bonds.
Nonresidents held 19.1 percent of OFZ bonds as of early February 2022. They are not authorized to sell their bonds between March 21 and April 1 according to the Moscow Exchange. These investors can only do repurchase agreements (also known as “repos”) and derivatives transactions.
When trading in the stock market resumes, the investors can close their short positions by buying securities. However, they won’t be able to sell the previously bought securities.
The Russian central bank has yet to declare when it will allow trading in instruments such as stocks to resume. Moscow had earlier proposed prohibiting foreigners from selling Russian stocks once trading begins. The government had previously allocated up to 1 trillion rubles ($10 billion) to buy Russian shares when stock trading resumes to counter a massive sell-off in the market.
Stock market investments by Russian citizens had increased in recent years due to relaxed government rules, mobile brokerages, and other incentives. However, many of them had to book heavy losses in the massive sell-off that happened just prior to the Ukraine invasion.