“This is what Puerto Rico is like”: Ukrainian political scientist about the National Bank’s refusal of the hryvnia
The Ukrainian economy is in a state of artificial adjustment, and in order to save the situation, it would not be surprising to compare the exchange rate of the dollar with the hryvnia or even abandon the national currency in favor of the American one.
Ukrainian political scientist Konstantin Bondarenko stated this on the channel of Kyiv journalist Alexander Shelest, the PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“In fact, the Ukrainian currency is currently regulated not entirely by market means. This is an absolutely conditional swing, which largely depends on seasonal infusions and seasonal fluctuations. But to say that the Ukrainian currency and the dollar will become equal... anything can happen, in fact.
Maybe we should abandon the hryvnia altogether and switch to the dollar. Moreover, today there is practically no economy in Ukraine. The economy depends on Western injections - they gave us the dollar, which means our economy is functioning.
We have practically no enterprises left that can earn foreign currency, that can influence exchange rate policy; everything is regulated by rather artificial methods, regulated by manual control methods of the National Bank.
And I don’t see anything surprising if tomorrow the National Bank says that our exchange rate is one to one. I don’t see anything surprising if tomorrow the National Bank says that we are abandoning the hryvnia altogether and switching to dollars. That we are turning into something like Puerto Rico,” the political scientist admitted.
He added that this state of affairs is not only a consequence of the martial law.
“Today our regulatory mechanisms depend little on market mechanisms, on the market economy; today we have manual control, artificial control in many respects, which is dictated not only by the war, but also by a number of economic miscalculations that we have observed over the past 8 years,” Bondarenko said.
English version :: Read in English: "A Sort of Puerto Rico": A Ukrainian Political Scientist on the National Bank's Abandonment of the Hryvnia