December 09, 2022 (MLN): The rising economic woes, plummeting forex reserves, and political noise have forced the Pakistani rupee (PKR) to lose 71 paisa against the US dollar during the week as the currency settled the trade at PKR 224.4 per USD, compared to the previous week’s closing at PKR 223.69 per USD.
In today’s session, the local unit remained relatively unchanged against the US dollar with quotes being recorded in a range of 60 paisa per USD showing an intraday high bid of 224.50 and an intraday low offer of 224.40.
Within the open market, PKR was traded at 230.25/232.55 per USD.
Today’s stability in the currency market was attributed to the news flows wherein Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed bin Abdullah Al-Jadaan stated that the kingdom will keep supporting by shoring up deposits and making investments from the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund.
Throughout the week, the domestic unit remained under pressure mainly due to decreasing foreign exchange reserves of the country that has reached $12.58 billion while the reserves held by SBP stood at $6.71bn which is barely enough to cover 1.28 months of import bills.
In addition to it, the inflows through RDA are losing attractiveness as the overseas Pakistanis deposited $141mn into RDA in November which was 3.42% lower when compared with $146mn recorded in the previous month and 41% lower when compared with $239mn in November 2021.
On the other hand, SBP Governor Jameel Ahmed is hopeful that foreign exchange reserves will increase in the second half of the current fiscal year due to expected inflows and rollovers of some external obligations.
In FYTD, PKR lost 19.55 rupees or 8.71%, while it plummeted by 47.88 rupees or 21.34% against the USD in CYTD, as per data compiled by Mettis Global.
Meanwhile, the currency lost 1.5 rupees to the Pound Sterling as the day's closing quote stood at PKR 275.04 per GBP, while the previous session closed at PKR 273.52 per GBP.
Similarly, PKR's value weakened by 1.3 rupees against EUR which closed at PKR 237.17 at the interbank today.
On another note, within the money market, the central bank conducted an Open Market Operation (OMO), and Shariah-compliant Mudarabah OMO today, in which it cumulatively injected a total of Rs568.85 billion into the market, from which Rs155.1bn injected into the market for 7 days at 16.20% and Rs289.25bn for 63 days at 16.09%.
The overnight repo rate towards the close of the session was 16.00/16.25%, whereas the 1-week rate was 16.05/16.15%.
Copyright Mettis Link News
Posted on: 2022-12-09T17:13:15+05:00
