MOSCOW - Natalia Leontyeva, a Siberian sales manager, bought a second hand car in 2013 with a loan worth about four monthly salaries. She now owes the equivalent of at least four years of earnings, one of a growing number of Russians struggling with debt.
“A third of those people taking loans already owe more than their annual income,” Maxim Oreshkin, Russia’s economy minister, told Reuters. “This is an issue of financial education, a debt trap, in some cases worse than gambling.” On Wednesday, President Vladimir Putin discussed consumer debt with Andrey Kostin, head of second-biggest state-run bank VTB , telling him in televised comments, “people should not be pushed to some kind of extreme state”.
This has moderated the potential fallout for the financial system but Oreshkin said borrowers are still exposed. Consumer lending growth rate has currently stabilized at 24-25% in annual terms, the central bank said in a response to a request to comment from Reuters. The central bank said in its response that it will raise risk requirements again for consumer loans in October, under which banks will have to evaluate a borrower’s existing debt before issuing a new loan.