- The Bank of Russia said Thursday it spent $1.85 billion in the first seven days of October to prop up the ruble, which has continued to weaken against the dollar and the euro.
The ruble has touched fresh lows daily in the past week, bruised by a decline in oil prices and falling domestic demand for hard currencies as external borrowing markets remain effectively closed for Russian companies and banks due to Western sanctions.
The central bank said it shifted the ruble's permitted corridor 20 kopecks higher to between 35.85 and 44.85 against a basket of euros and dollars, which the central bank uses as its key gauge of the currency market, by the end of the main trading session on Wednesday.
The ruble, however, finished the main trading session on the Micex exchange at 44.99 against the euro-dollar basket, suggesting that the central bank stopped intervening before the market closed.
According to the central bank's intervention rules, the ruble floats within a trading band. Whenever the ruble moves to the weak end of the band, the central bank begins selling dollars and euros to cushion the currency's decline. It automatically moves the band by 5 kopecks, or five hundredths of a ruble, once an intervention allotment of $350 million is exhausted.
The central bank said it spent $1.846 billion between Oct. 1 and Oct. 7 to limit the ruble's drop--its strongest intervention since March, when the ruble tumbled on Moscow's desire to annex Ukraine's region of Crimea.
The central bank, which reveals the intervention data with a two-day lag, spent more on the ruble support by Thursday, eating into its reserves of gold and foreign exchange. In late September, the reserves were still the world's fourth largest, at $457 billion.
Compared with the dollar, the ruble traded at 40.02, losing some 0.05% on the day. Against the euro, the ruble eased 0.13% to 50.99.

 - NZD-USD higher, new daily high close to first daily resistance (0.7953).

- Majors (vs USD): NZD +0.94%; CAD +0.61%; CHF +0.53%; EUR +0.51%; GBP +0.45%; AUD +0.27%; JPY -0.05%.