PKR: Fell on Black Days

April 05, 2023 (MLN): Sliding further, the Pakistani rupee (PKR) has depreciated by 56 paisa against the US dollar in today's interbank session as the currency settled the trade at PKR 287.85 per USD, against yesterday's close of PKR 287.29 per USD.

Throughout today’s session, the local unit traded in a band of 1.26 rupees, showing an intraday high bid of 288.5 and low offer of 287.80 while in the open market, PKR was traded at 290/293 per USD.

In the absence of fresh inflows, increasing demand for dollars and plummeting reserves have badly put pressure on the local unit.

 Meanwhile, the continuous delay in the IMF tranche has made the market participants skeptical pertaining to the possibility of funding which caused importers to panic and purchase dollars at higher prices.

Adding more pressure, the political noise created further doubts about whether the fund wanted to give any helping hand to the ruling government.

Despite the miserable situation wherein IMF clearly put forth one after another prerequisite, the SBP Governor Jameel Ahmad is optimistic for the fund revival very soon.

During an analyst briefing on the latest monetary policy statement on Tuesday, he said that the fund loan program will help the reserves to be increased above $10 billion by the end of FY23.

To note, the SBP in its latest MPC meeting raised the policy rate by 21% which would add approximately Rs200bn to debt servicing cost for the government on an annualized basis, Fahad Rauf, Head of Research at Ismail Iqbal Securities told Mettis Global.

Meanwhile, the currency lost 2.7 rupees to the Pound Sterling as the day's closing quote stood at PKR 360 per GBP, while the previous session closed at PKR 357.33 per GBP.

Similarly, PKR's value weakened by 2.2 rupees against EUR which closed at PKR 315.6 at the interbank today.

In FYTD, PKR lost 83 rupees or 28.84%, while it plummeted by 61.42 rupees or 21.34% against the USD in CYTD. On the other hand, within the last seven sessions, the local unit moved down by 1.37%, as per data compiled by Mettis Global.

On another note, within the money market, the overnight repo rate towards the close of the session was 21.25%/21.5%, whereas the 1-week rate was 20.85%/20.95%.

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