What are these yearly spikes in the Russian Money Supply?

Question

During a school project, I realized there are these consistent annual spikes in the Russian money supply chart. Any one know what these are?

https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/money-supply-m2

Answer 1

You are looking at seasonally unadjusted data (M2 in blue below).

Intensity of supply and demand of credit fluctuates with seasons, and to allow analyzing the underlying trend, I suggest to download the seasonally adjusted data (M2_SA) from the Bank of Russia (CBR) directly. The difference is like this:

CBR uses the standard X-13ARIMA-SEATS Seasonal Adjustment Program from the US Census Bureau, in line with

• ESS Guidelines on Seasonal Adjustment, Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities.
• Monetary and Financial Statistics: Compilation Guide — Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund, 2008.

P.S. If you are interested in computer programming, you can try to compute this adjustment yourself, using some of the available packages (just google X 13 Arima Seats Python for example).