CB warns against dollar hoarding as rupee falls
(Colombo) REUTERS: Sri Lanka’s Central Bank is concerned about the dollar hoarding and market manipulation that’s exacerbating the rupee’s weakness and has the tools to correct any misalignment in the exchange rate, its governor told Reuters.
The rupee has been falling steadily since April and is on course to retest recent historic lows. It could fall as much as 8 percent for the full year against the dollar in 2018 as exporters hold back on converting their dollar earnings into the local currency, traders and analysts said.
The country’s massive trade deficit has been primarily behind the rupee’s four percent fall so far this year. It was last traded at 159.30 to the dollar, recovering from an all-time low of 161.17 that it hit on June 20. It fell 2.6 percent in 2017.
“We are in the process of collecting export earning data from banks,” Central Bank Governor Indrajit Coomaraswamy told Reuters on the sidelines of an event in Colombo on Monday. In earlier emailed comments, he said “there is concern that exporters have not been converting their proceeds because there has been some reduction in the inflows to the market that does not seem warranted by underlying fundamentals.”
The Central Bank is in the process of assessing if the currency depreciation is a result of a market manipulation and “misaligned with underlying fundamentals”, he said. The Central Bank does not see “any fundamental reasons” for the rupee’s weakness, he said. “If at any point we conclude there is such misalignment, the Central Bank has the tools to address this without depleting reserves.