Last year, the Russians bought government federal bonds (OFZ) amounting to 93 billion rubles.
This number is three times higher than in 2016, it follows from the Bank of Russia's data. Almost half of purchases accounts for 'people's bonds'.
The Central Bank notes that investments in bonds has become more accessible due to the placement of the Finance Ministry's of 'people's bonds', while a reduction in deposit rates stimulated the search for more profitable solutions.
The Ministry of Finance presented a new tool for individuals - OFZ - to the market last year, Izvestia newspaper recalls. 'People's bonds' are fully guaranteed by the state, they have a higher yield than bank deposits. But their share in the total volume of purchases was less than half. The population shows the highest level of trust in government securities, while the purchase of corporate bonds is associated with risks.
The head of the finance, monetary circulation and credit department at RANEPA, Alexander Khandruev, speaking to Vestnik Kavkaza, noted that the popularization of OFZs among the population was influenced by two factors. "The first one is explanatory work with potential investors. The banks authorized to work with OFZ tried to attract as many customers to new financial products as possible. But the second factor is more important - natural reduction of deposit rates due to a lowering of the Central Bank's key rate. The rate dropped to 5%, Sberbank even has deposits of 4.7%. In this situation, many people chose to invest their money in products that do not have risks due to state guarantees and provide higher returns," he explained, adding that it was also affected by the low level of financial literacy pf the population.
The threefold increase in the OFZ deposits was due to the low base effect. "These 93 billion rubles of investments in OFZ are quite small compared to almost 26 trillion rubles in bank deposits. The potential for transferring to bonds remains, but everything will depend on bond yield and transaction costs of the population. This is the capital that you need to be able to manage - if a person sees that it is too difficult for him, he will prefer to deposit money at lower interest rates," the economist said.
According to him, there has been a tendency to reduce the share of deposits and increase investment in securities. "Not only federal bonds and corporate bonds are increasing output, but in general the so-called 'bondization' of the economy is gaining momentum. This is quite natural, since Russia lags well behind many countries in the world in purchasing bonds and shares by individuals, a tiny percentage of our population invest in securities," Alexander Khandruyev predicts.
