Russia - slipping on that slippery slope

The Russian centralbank confirmed they are widening the RUB corridor at the same time as hiking interest rates from 12% to 13%.
This was motivated by; "stemming capital outflows and dampening inflationtrends". Smells like they are loosing the grip to me. Hmmm,,, perhaps the bull rally will not last that long? At least not in Europe. I honestly hope that the Latvian government knows what to do in this situation. First thing I come up with is for the currency to float. But then again, what do I know?

Where is the Swedish Riksbank contingency planning? They need to become more proactive on this issue and realise that this is a very serious crisis, coming soon to a Swedish bank and currency near you. Get involved. Stop pretending everything is hunkydory. The Swedish banks will lobby their hardest in order not to float. They should be ignored.

Anyway, keep a very close eye on the developments in Russia nearterm.
If the Russian bear should fall, it would drag many others with it, with strong repercussions for Europe.

For anyone interested, go to http://www.imf.org/external/index.htm and read the IMF;s latest working paper on "The tasks ahead". In essence, it highlights the very problematic funding issues for the IMF in order to be able to support the Emerging markets, as well as the necessity of it. Not very encouraging reading if one expected the Emerging market funding issue to have been all figured out. Any big Emerging country going down, such as Russia would cause major problems as such a country by itself, might empty the IMF;s funds.