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Pakistan needs $340bn to meet climate challenges, says FM Akhtar

Caretaker Finance Minister Dr Shamshad Akhtar said on Wednesday Pakistan is facing a trade-off between raising climate finance and development finance. “I think we need to be conscious that getting money is a big issue that we face in addressing the climate agenda,” she said, noting that seeking money for climate finance undercuts other development finance requirements. Speaking at the secon

Stocks race higher on policy rate status quo

Share prices rose on Tuesday on the back of the status quo announced in the monetary policy announcement a day ago. Topline Securities Ltd said the State Bank of Pakistan kept the key interest rate unchanged in view of a projected easing in the Consumer Price Index October onwards — a trend that’s likely to continue into the second half of 2023-24. In addition, the federal government’s appro

Is IMF feeding the flames?

The International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) role is to help countries recover from financial crises by offering them loans, albeit with the caveat of imposing structural programmes, which is where the controversy begins. The 1997 Asian Financial Crisis was a convoluted region-wide crisis. Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and South Korea operated in a hot-money bubble in the 1980s and 1990s:

Embracing digital wallets for freelancers

Things got pretty exciting for Pakistan’s freelance community as the State Bank introduced a new framework allowing them to open the Exporters’ Special Foreign Currency Account to retain their dollars. In a similar vein, Sadapay made a big splash when they announced integrating with Apple Pay and GPay, enabling freelancers to get paid directly into their wallets. The product seems to be pretty

Rupee loses more value to dollar

There was no change in the exchange rate trend and the rupee lost another 52 paise against the US dollar to close at Rs281.47 in the interbank market on Tuesday. It seems the market would remain calm and cool till the end of the negotiations with the IMF which would begin from Nov 2. Experts believe that the slow appreciation of the dollar would not hurt the IMF meeting and the country would ea