Kazakhstan’s National Bank spends $1.7B to maintain exchange rate of national currency

The National Bank of Kazakhstan has spent $1.714 billion on currency interventions to maintain the exchange rate of the national currency – tenge, according to the bank’s data.

The official exchange rate on Oct.12 is 274.41 tenge/$1.

The National Bank of Kazakhstan started to carry out currency interventions on Sept.16.

The volume of its currency interventions totaled $1.158 billion from Sept.16 to Sept.30.

Moreover, $556.6 million has been spent on currency interventions for maintaining the exchange rate of tenge in Kazakhstan since early October.

Earlier, in order to ensure the implementation of the new monetary policy, the National Bank of Kazakhstan canceled the currency corridor for the exchange rate of tenge and switched to the inflation targeting regime and free floating exchange rate on Aug.20.

As a result, the exchange rate of tenge against the US dollar dropped by 26 percent, continued to decrease in the subsequent few days and reached 300 tenge per dollar.

The National Bank of Kazakhstan said Sept.16 that it has started to carry out currency interventions because of the increased volatility of the exchange rate of tenge due to speculative operations of participants of the currency market in the absence of objective and significant changes in fundamental macroeconomic factors.

/By Trend/