The country’s liquid foreign exchange reserves remained in the green zone this week inching up to $16.769 billion, the central bank reported Thursday.
This shows a slight increase of 0.6 per cent or $111 million over the past week when the country possessed $16.658 billion. This surge is on the back of an across-the-board increase in the dollar reserves of the central and commercial banks. During the current week, which ended on December 23, the State Bank counted its foreign exchange reserves higher by 0.3 per cent at $12.806 billion as against $12.757 billion of the preceding week.
Similarly, the commercial banks’ holdings of the greenback swelled to $3.962 billion, registering a hike of 1.5 percent compared to last week’s $3.900 billion. The analysts believe that the current seesawing trend in the country’s dollar reserves was mainly based on the volume of import payments plus the retirement of external debts that, according to SBP data, have aggregated to $62 billion.
