Staff correspondent :<\/p>\n
The country\u2019s foreign currency reserves fell drastically by nearly half a billion US dollars in the week till Wednesday as the central bank had to deploy dollars aggressively to fund imports and return commercial bank assets.<\/p>\n
The reserves fell by $534 million in the seven days till Wednesday standing at $19.45 billion, down from $19.98 billion on the previous Wednesday (20 March), as per Bangladesh Bank data.<\/p>\n
The reserves were above $21 billion in the first week of March, and went below $19 billion due to the payment of Asian Clearing Union (ACU) bills.<\/p>\n
Since then the reserves have fallen further, and a strong remittance inflow in the month of Ramadan has not been enough to ease the rate of decline.<\/p>\n
Pressure on the Bangladesh Bank stash is high likely due to commercial banks taking back the dollars they deposited with the central bank under a currency swap scheme last month.<\/p>\n
At the same time, the central bank has to keep digging into its forex reserves to pay for import bills and expenses for state-enterprises<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Staff correspondent : The country\u2019s foreign currency reserves fell drastically by nearly half a billion US dollars in the week till Wednesday as the central bank had to deploy dollars aggressively to fund imports and return commercial bank assets. The reserves fell by $534 million in the seven days till Wednesday standing at $19.45 billion, down from $19.98 billion on the previous Wednesday (20 March), as per Bangladesh Bank data. The reserves were above $21 billion in the first week of March, and went below $19 billion due to the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6700,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"yes","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_5980380192037842_108390337697511":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyenglishtimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyenglishtimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyenglishtimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyenglishtimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyenglishtimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6699"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dailyenglishtimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6699\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6701,"href":"https:\/\/dailyenglishtimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6699\/revisions\/6701"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyenglishtimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyenglishtimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyenglishtimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyenglishtimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}