SBP reserves jump to $4.52bn

The central bank’s foreign exchange reserves increased by $61 million to close at $4.52 billion during the week ended July 7, official data showed on Thursday. The reserves didn’t include the $4.2bn inflows the State Bank received earlier this week from the International Monetary Fund and two countries. Adding those inflows will take the bank’s reserves to $8.7bn, close to a level they were last seen in October. “During the current week, SBP received an inflow of $2bn from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, $1bn from the United Arab Emirates, and around $1.2 billion from IMF. These inflows will be reflected in SBP’s FX reserves for the week ending on 14-Jul-2023,” the central bank said. The country’s total reserves have now jumped to $9.84bn, as the holdings of commercial banks have also slightly gone up to $5.31bn. The SBP’s reserves started going downhill at the beginning of 2022, falling from $17.6bn on Jan 7 to $5.6bn on Dec 30 that year. The decline continued in the new year, with the reserves hitting the lowest level during this period at $2.92bn on Feb 3. The last time reserves were below that level was nine years ago, i.e. $2.84bn in February 2014.