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How to live and work with a rate of 21% or even 25%?
How to live and work with a rate of 21% or even 25%? The head of VTB did not rule out that the key rate could be raised to 21%.
Business FM asked business leaders how their businesses would operate at 21% and what threatens them most: high inflation.
VTB CEO Andrey Kostin (the day before) did not rule out that the Central Bank's base interest rate could reach 21% this year.
At the Finopolis forum, Kostin was also asked whether he thinks the key rate could reach 25% next year. The banker did not rule this out in his answer.
On the other hand, inflation in Russia is not decreasing. In annual terms, September price growth was almost 10%. We asked regular speakers of BFM.ru how they cope with the difference between inflation and key interest rates. And what will happen if interest rates rise even more?
"In our company's example, the cycle from purchasing raw materials to receiving payment for finished goods is 4-5 months. Cocoa products are not grown in Russia. Prepayment is made because bank letters of credit are currently not working. So, you could get a loan at 7-8% with a minimum refinancing rate. Now you can get a loan at 20%. So you can calculate how much interest your money will accrue in 5 months. This means that such an increase in interest rates should simply lead to an increase in commodity prices by 6-7%. Therefore, the costs should be transferred directly to the final price. As a representative of the manufacturing industry, it is not entirely clear to me how much higher interest rates will be able to contain inflation. "In fact, the rate will increase," he said.
Mikhail Goncharov, founder and manager of the Teremok restaurant chain: “I have experience working in the inflation sphere, and oddly enough, both times it was very positive. I remember the massive inflation of the 90s, when we ruthlessly raised prices. In the consumer sector, there is an opinion that inflation is actually good for business. Firstly, all illiquid assets are sold, secondly, everything is sold and no one understands what price is right and what is not. You come - whatever the price, you pay exactly that. Oddly enough, consumers can suffer the most, but then again, this is when real incomes of the population decrease. But now we have found ourselves in a somewhat unexpected situation, when almost every industry is experiencing a massive shortage of employees, which creates fierce competition and forces wages to rise. Over the past year, perhaps in the entire history of me as an entrepreneur and Teremok as a company, we have never raised wages so often. 10-15-20-30% depending on the location. For example, if prices go up 20% and wages go up 30%, what happens to inflation? Good for you. Businesses are growing, employees are getting wages that are increasingly higher than inflation, and overall there don’t seem to be any casualties. “The government seems to be making similar calculations,” he said.
Baon Chairman Ilya Yaroshenko: "These interest rates and interest rate increases, as well as bankers' comments "allow the strongest to survive" - it's "nice" to hear all this. We are holding on for now, as long as we can withstand competition and high inflation. Demand was high, but there are already signs that consumption is slowing down a little and who will leave the market faster - bankers or traders. There has been a slight slowdown in demand. It is impossible to predict when this will become important. Perhaps they will print a lot of money and distribute it to the population and support this demand for a year or two, so that we can continue to live, survive and even earn money. How much money the consumer will have, and we cannot predict this, so we would prefer to return to normal speed."
At the same Finopolis forum, the heads of the Central Bank and Sberbank argued about a single QR.