Daily Times

Pakistani rupee showed strength against the US dollar for the second session in a row and recovered to 182.93 on Monday.

The State Bank of Pakistan said in a statement that the dollar opened at Rs184.68 in the interbank market and closed at Rs182.93 after losing Rs1.75 (+0.96 percent).

In the last session, the dollar slipped from Rs188.18 to Rs184.68 after losing Rs3.50 (+1.9 percent). The rupee has recovered Rs5.25 (+2.79 percent) against the dollar during the last two sessions. Overall, the rupee shed Rs0.69 against the US dollar last week, while the local unit devalued by Rs25.50 during the ongoing fiscal year 2021-22 and Rs6.48 during the current year 2022.

The currency analysts said that with the formation of the new government, the current political crisis is likely to end and the rupee may recover further losses in the coming days. They said the local unit appreciated against the dollar after much clarity on the domestic political landscape. The central bank’s bold move to raise the policy rate by 250bps a day earlier provided support to rupee and it made a decent recovery against the US dollar. The SBP on Thursday sharply increased the key policy rate by 2.5 percent to 12.25 percent in an unscheduled monetary policy committee meeting.

The SBP reported earlier that foreign exchange reserves of the country fell to $17.477 billion by the week ended April 1, 2022. The country’s foreign exchange reserves hit an all-time high of $27.228 billion on August 27, 2021 and have declined $9.78 billion since then, owing to demand for the dollars for import payments and external repayment of government debt. The official forex reserves of the central bank, which is the benchmark for calculating the financial strength of a country, also fell to $11.32 billion, which are less than two months of import cover. The import bill for the month of March 2022 stood at $6.186 billion, according to the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics.