The Role of Information in Currency Crises

Information policy plays a very important role in managing the monetary policy, since it is one of the instruments that allows to act more efficiently. Modern researchers of currency crises are increasingly referring to the positive impact of uncertainty during the crisis. In fact, such uncertainty is largely ambiguous: information on the fundamental macroeconomic consequences can both help deepen the crisis, and lead to its smoothing and mitigation. The study of this problem becomes more complicated because of the inability to identify and measure uncertainty, as well as the difficulties in unifying influence of the uncertainty from everything else. The purpose of this work was to identify the impact of uncertainty regarding the fundamental macroeconomic variables on speculative actions in the currency market of Russia in 2014. As a result of the study, a speculative pressue index was calculated following the Eichengreen et al. method (Eichengreen, Rose, Wyplosz, 1996), and uncertainty was estimated using the GDP growth forecasts data. The results obtained from the estimation of the econometric model using the MMP method, confirm only the negative effect produced by uncertainty on the foreign exchange market. To reveal the nonmonotonic influence suggested by scientists the model can be further developed. But the conclusion from this study is that a transparent information policy is the most effective one in the context of a currency crisis.