When you are thinking about sending money abroad, an international money transfer provider is a great option. They can help you with the whole process, provide useful online tools and most importantly bank-beating exchange rates and low or zero fees.
This is the current USD-RUB mid-market exchange rate. The Total Cost of each foreign transfer in the above table is calculated as the sum of all fees and the exchange rate margin, which is the difference between the provider's exchange rate and the mid-market USD-RUB exchange rate.
Whenever you are interested in an exchange rate you are actually interested in two currencies due to the fact that the value of a currency must always be quoted in comparison to a second currency.
So it follows that if you are determining the best time to transact, in this case the USD vs RUB, you should pay attention to both United States Dollar and Russian Ruble news and forecasts.
26-January-19: 2018 was a reasonable year for the dollar. Measured by the US Dollar Index, the greenback appreciated by 4 percent, which was much better than 2017’s 10 percent loss. It was, though, something of a stuttering end to 2018 and the dollar has had mixed fortunes in early 2019.
In December, after lifting US interest rates to 2.25-2.5 percent, the Fed lowered its expectations for future hikes due to so-called “cross currents” (China, Brexit, trade wars etc.). Skepticism among analysts over future Fed hikes has for some time been the main reason for dollar pessimism for 2019, but now, there is also the prospect of a US economic slowdown to contend with.
“A slowdown in the economy is likely to weigh on USD particularly in the second half of this year,” a CIBC researcher said in January.
Of the same opinion was an expert at ING, who argued that the dollar is soon to “embark on a gradual long-term bearish trend.”
January’s extended US government shutdown also has dollar-negative ramifications. Not only is the shutdown likely to hit first-quarter GDP growth, disagreements within Congress bode poorly for the future of potentially inflationary fiscal spending.
31-December-18: 2018 was a year of steady depreciation for the ruble. As the end of December approached, markets quoted 69.35 rubles to the dollar and 79.5 rubles to the euro, marking respective depreciation of 17 percent and 12 percent on the year.
Analysts said that ruble weakness in 2018 had been driven by central bank buying of foreign currencies for the purposes of bolstering Russia’s FX reserves – an act that necessitates selling large amounts of rubles, which weighs on valuations. Equally, US sanctions on Russia played a part, as did a mid-year emerging market currency crisis and an end-of-year slump in the price of Russia’s largest export, oil. Crude products lost 40 percent of their value between early October and year-end.
In December, Goldman Sachs predicted a strong energy market rebound in 2019. If realised, this would underpin the ruble.
TradingEconomics.com were predicting a slightly stronger ruble in 2019; its 2019 year-end forecast for USD/RUB was 68.0.
