Russia is achieving goal of lowering inflation while avoiding economic cooling - Putin

VLADIVOSTOK. Sept 3 (Interfax) - Russia is achieving its goal of lowering inflation, and it is important to avoid overcooling the economy, but the Central Bank and the government are managing to do this on the whole, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a plenary session of the Eastern Economic Forum.

"The most important thing is not state investments, not state resources, but private investments. The state's role is to create the right conditions for those investments. We truly have had a decline in investments recently, for a range of reasons, primarily due to the policy which the regulator, the Central Bank, and the government of the Russian Federation are consciously conducting. The goal is to suppress inflation - we could not allow any hyper-surge [in prices] to occur, but this was a threat. We now have 6.3% inflation in annual terms [as calculated by the Economy Development Ministry as of August 31] - we are reaching the goal. It is important that we do not overcool the economy here, which we understand perfectly well. From the very first steps, when we first started this work, we knew that and we acted on it," he said.

"There are various opinions on this matter. Some say that it is already time to start a new cycle [of economic growth], to give our economy more impetus, and so on. We could discuss this with the experts forever. But our main task is to create the right conditions for private investment," Putin said.

"And on the whole, I think that both the government and the Central Bank are generally succeeding in navigating between Scylla and Charybdis, and this is leading to the anticipated effects which we talked about at the very start, when we began this process one and a half to two years ago," he said.