Ruble drops to past 60 per dollar

Moscow: The Russian ruble on Tuesday plummeted past 60 against the dollar for the first time since March on falling oil prices, complicating the central bank´s efforts to jump-start the battered economy.
The ruble reached 60.30 per dollar in early afternoon trading in Moscow after having lost two percent of its value on Monday.
The new weakening of the ruble, which comes after the embattled currency bounced back somewhat in recent months, is expected to further erode consumption and fuel inflation, which stood at 15.3 percent last month.
"Inflation is already extremely high, and another sharp fall in the ruble would fuel it even further, which, in turn, would intensify the squeeze on households´ real incomes," Liza Ermolenko, an emerging markets economist at Capital Economics, told AFP.