MOSCOW — Elvira S. Nabiullina, the governor of Russia’s central bank, was deep into a speech about her new currency policy when it became clear nobody was paying attention.
Her audience, chief Russia economists from a dozen or so foreign banks, were looking down at their laps to nervously check their smartphones. The ruble, which had been slowly slipping after a predawn interest rate increase by the central bank, had just plunged 19 percent.
Outside the chandeliered, czarist-era conference room in the central bank’s headquarters, the panicky signs of an economic crisis were taking shape on the streets. Muscovites desperate to unload increasingly worthless rubles were frantically buying televisions, washing machines, winter coats and other goods.
While Ms. Nabiullina was receiving notes from aides about the rout during that December meeting, she kept right on with her speech, extolling the virtues of dropping the currency’s two-decade trading peg and letting market forces have their way.
“Her message was, ‘We are not targeting the rate; the ruble will do what it does,’” one of the bankers at the closed-door meeting recalled of the speech.
–
To her critics, Ms. Nabiullina simply let down her guard on her nation’s money.
One member of Parliament in the ruling United Russia party last fall called the bank an “enemy of the nation” and said its rate-setting team was bent on doing “evil.”
And it is unclear how long Ms. Nabiullina can hold out. Anger about the bank’s passivity is rising. Last month, a top aide to Ms. Nabiullina, Ksenia Yudaeva, an economist trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, resigned as chief of monetary policy, by some accounts after being pushed out.
Along with Ms. Nabiullina, Ms. Yudaeva had orchestrated the switch to the free float. An economist who once served in the Soviet Union’s central bank, Dmitry Tulin, took her place.
With time, their reputation might revive, Robert Schlegel, a member of Parliament, said in an interview. “People who have more of a burden of responsibility suffer more criticism,” he said.
