Even Russians Are Running From the Ruble

PARIS -- In recent weeks, the fall in the Russian ruble and Russian stock markets closely tracked the declines in global oil prices. But everything changed on Dec. 15. The oil price remained stable, but the ruble and the stock price indexes lost 30 percent from Monday morning to Tuesday afternoon. An unprecedented effort by Russia's Central Bank in the wee hours of Dec. 16 to stabilize the ruble, by hiking the interest rate from 10.5 percent to 17 percent, proved useless. The cause of Russia's "...