Balance sheet data for the Soviet Bank for Foreign Trade (Vneshtorgbank) have recently been published in the monthly journal of the State Bank of the USSR. ~ This marks the first publication of such statistics on the activities of any Soviet banking institution in over thirty years. Hopefully, the appearance in print of statistical material of this sort is a prelude to disclosure of other domestic banking and monetary data, which would serve to increase understanding of many interesting facets of the Soviet economic system. For example, no balance sheet for the State Bank of the USSR, the Soviet central bank, has been published since well before World War II, a situation which seems oddly incompatible with the position of the Soviet Union as the world's second leading industrial power. The practice is also somewhat at variance with the generally more liberal policy followed in the past decade in providing statistics relating to many economic activities more significant than domestic banking, a sphere usually considered of secondary importance in the centrally planned Soviet economy. Nevertheless, the recent publication of data on the Soviet Foreign Trade Bank is a welcome sign, and one sufficiently curious to merit some tentative appraisal of the new data.
For convenience, the new statistics, shown in Table 1, have been converted from rubles to U. S. dollars at the official rate of exchange (ruble --$1.11). In accordance with what appears to be standard Soviet usage, z The author is Senior Economist in the Division of International Finance, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. The views expressed in this article do not represent the opinions of the Federal Reserve Board. The author wishes to thank Messrs. George Garvy and Eugene Babitchev, of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, for helpful comments on an earlier draft.