![]() ![]() The Pakistan Stock Exchange, however, reacted positively to the rupee’s fall, with the KSE 100 index shooting up more than 1,000 points, or 2.5%. The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) and the finance ministry did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.Īttempts by Finance Minister Ishaq Dar to defend the rupee since his appointment in September, including reported currency market interventions, had run counter to the IMF’s advice. “We requested the central bank to increase the interbank (rate) to help combat the black market,” ECAP President Malik Bostan told Reuters. Nearly 220 million people in Pakistan without power after countrywide outage High voltage power lines in Karachi, Pakistan, on Wednesday, June 8, 2022. In the open market, the rupee weakened from 243 rupees to the dollar to 262, a drop of about 7%, having lost 1.2% the previous day, according to the Exchange Companies Association of Pakistan (ECAP) trade data. The drop in the official rate was the biggest since 1999 in both absolute and percentage terms, according to JS Global, a Pakistani brokerage house. Wednesday’s move by foreign currency dealers, whose open market rates are different from the rate notified by the central bank, had a cascade effect on official exchange rates on Thursday. The foreign exchange companies said on Wednesday that they had removed the cap for the sake of the country, because it was causing “artificial” distortions for the economy. The lender announced on Thursday that it was sending a mission to the country at the end of January to discuss resuming the program.Īside from wanting the government to take fiscal measures, the IMF is pushing for it to move to a market-determined exchange rate regime, which the IMF highlighted in its statement on Thursday. It was topped up with another $1 billion last year to help the country following devastating floods, but the IMF then suspended disbursements in November due to Pakistan’s failure to make more progress on fiscal consolidation. Pakistan secured a $6 billion IMF bailout in 2019. The currency’s official value closed at 255.4 rupees against the dollar versus 230.9 on Wednesday, the central bank said.įacing an acute balance of payments crisis, Pakistan is desperate to secure external financing, with less than three weeks’ worth of import cover in its foreign exchange reserves, which fell $923 million to $3.68 billion in the latest data. The drop comes a day after foreign exchange companies removed a cap on the exchange rate, a key demand of the IMF as part of a program of economic reforms it has agreed on with the cash-strapped South Asian nation. The Pakistani rupee fell 9.6% against the dollar on Thursday, central bank data showed - the biggest one-day drop in over two decades - in a slump that may persuade the International Monetary Fund to resume lending to the country. ![]()
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