Russians struggling to survive add pressure to end lockdown

Bloomberg

Grigory Sverdlin has been doling out free meals from a night bus in Russia’s second-biggest city for the best part of the past two decades. Rarely has he seen so much demand as in the past few weeks.
“In St. Petersburg we usually feed around 80 people a night at each of the four stops. Now there are 120-140 people every evening,” said Sverdlin, who started as a volunteer at the Nochlezhka charity in 2003 and is now director.
“There’s just a huge number of people right now who are out of work and on the street, or in a very difficult financial situation.” Russians are running out of money after six weeks of lockdown and minimal government support, adding to pressure that pushed President Vladimir Putin to start reopening the economy even as the infection total surges to the second-highest in the world. Putin announced the end of a national stay-at-home period, and Moscow and other major cities are slowly beginning to loosen restrictions.
Almost half of Russians have either no savings or just enough to cover them for the next four weeks, a survey by Moscow’s Centre for Strategic Research published this week showed. About a quarter of the population has had to spend reserves since the start of the lockdown to cover a drop in income, according to the central bank.
“The situation with incomes has become pretty dreadful,” said Dmitry Dolgin, an economist at ING Bank in Moscow. “Pressure will increase either to ease the lockdown or ease fiscal policy.”
The government has $165 billion stashed away in a rainy-day fund, but it’s been reluctant to spend too much on economic stimulus in case the situation worsens due to the plunge in global demand for oil, Russia’s main export earner.
Real disposable incomes are set to drop this quarter to levels not seen since 2006, according to Bloomberg Economics.