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Comment by notreallyserio | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean when you say "Sberbank - 1$ = 110,49₽" and "Tinkoff - 1$ = 153,75₽"? Are these different exchange rates for different banks?

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Yes. You can purchase dollars in exchange of Rubles.

Previous week it was aprox. 80 Rubles per U.S. Dollar.

Now due to the White House's statement that there will be sanctions against the Russia's central bank (they shouldn't able to use the reserves to keep Ruble stable) it is predicted that Ruble will collapse tomorrow.

It seems like too large a difference between banks, wouldn't this lead to arbitrage?

I believe currently only one of these banks can enable you to get your money out of Russia — thus the difference.

He means that the local currency is set to depreciate by half in a span of a week. And the bottom might be far far lower.

So these figures are from different times as well as different banks? If so then cool, that was the missing piece.

different banks? - Yes.

different times - No.

How extremely odd. Wonder why the values haven't converged? Do people inside the country not have access to this information? What's stopping someone from buying 150 rubles for a dollar and then buying $1.40ish for those same 150 rubles?

I should have perhaps mentioned in the original post:

1$ = 152,3₽ (buying 1 US dollar)

1$ = 85,7₽ (selling 1 US dollar).

Just because you pay 152₽ to buy 1$ doesn't mean you can sell it at the same price. At least banks won't buy it.

According to banki.ru the best price for selling US dollar now is 94,00₽.

Hope that clarifies it.

I see, the friction is in doing the reverse transaction. I guess you could find a buyer outside the traditional markets to complete the arbitrage transactions but that's going to be risky. Thanks for the clarification.

In times of such turmoil the spread between buy and sell price becomes so vast that it'll shield the exchangers from such schemes.

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