A rock and a hard place

摘要

Fixed investment has been rising strongly over the past four years, as Russian factories retool to take advantage of booming demand. But very little of this spending is financed with bank loans. Russia's banks are still not playing their traditional role as financial intermediates, so where is the money coming from? Putting in double-digit growth for most of the past six years, fixed investment growth has started to slow down in the past two months: fixed investment was up 10.7% year-on-year in July, a little less than the 12.5% average over the first half of the year.