Fall in reserves again due to sale of dollars
September 23, 2024Updated:September 23, 20243 Mins Read
Jumbangla Desk: Bangladesh Bank had announced not to sell dollars from the reserve to solve the ongoing crisis in the country. In the end, ignoring that promise, Bangladesh Bank sold dollars from the reserve this September as well. It sold 955 million dollars in just two and a half months. In spite of the recent increase in remittances, the total reserves have decreased. Even the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) target for expendable reserves for September fell below $14.88 billion.

Dollar

Although the expendable reserves were around 15 billion dollars last August. This information is known from Bangladesh Bank.
According to the information of the central bank, till September 19 of the current fiscal year 2024-25, Bangladesh Bank sold that amount of dollars to various commercial banks to pay the import bills of some essential products including fertilizer, fuel, food for government work.

Among them, about 106 million dollars in September, 170 million dollars in August, 679 million dollars in July, and the dollar sales amount of the last financial year was 12.79 billion dollars. Before that, the sales in the fiscal year 2022-23 were 13.58 billion dollars and in the fiscal year 2021-22 it was 7.62 billion dollars.

On the other hand, in the current financial year, Bangladesh Bank bought 185 million dollars. At the same time, the banks themselves traded only $50 million through currency swaps.

Husne Ara Shikha, the spokesperson and executive director of Bangladesh Bank, said that currently no dollar is being sold from the reserve. Commercial banks are trading dollars as interbank. But he did not comment on the central bank governor's pledge not to sell the dollar.

As of September 19, the total dollar in the central bank was 24.56 billion dollars. It is 19.42 billion dollars as BPM-6 in terms of IMF loan. From there, if 5.12 billion is deducted for current liabilities and dues, the expendable reserve (NIR) stands at 14.30 billion dollars. But last August 20 expendable reserves were about 15.54 billion dollars.

At the same time, Bangladesh Bank's total reserves were 26.76 billion dollars and according to IMF criteria BPM-6 model was 20.78 billion dollars. In the history of the country on August 25, 2021, the amount of record reserves was 48.06 billion dollars.

According to the data of the central bank, the continuation of last August is in this month of September. As of 21st of this month, remittances have reached 1.63 billion dollars or 163 crore 42 lakh dollars, which is 21 thousand 611 crores in Bangladeshi currency (as 120 taka per dollar). And 7 million 80 million dollars are coming every day. If remittances continue like this, remittances of about two and a half billion dollars will come this month.