Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 15
By Nigar Guliyeva – Trend:
The gold and foreign exchange reserves of Uzbekistan increased by $750 million since the beginning of autumn and reached $26 billion as of November 1.
The first deputy chairman of the Central Bank of Uzbekistan (CBU) Timur Ishmetov announced this at a meeting of the International Press Club Nov.15.
"Usually, we did not publish this information, it was considered confidential, and recently the head of state made a decision to "declassify" a whole series of economic data and make them open. Staring Jan. 1, each agency, including the Central Bank, will officially publish data on gold and currency reserves, money supply indicators and all economic indicators, and today we officially announce the amount of gold and foreign currency reserves for the first time," he said.
Ishmetov noted that, in preparation for the liberalization of monetary policy, some economists were interested whether the country has enough reserves. "We tried to explain that we are not going to spend the gold and foreign exchange reserves accumulated over these years ... We announced that the exchange rate will be formed on the basis of market principles, which means that we should not interfere with our interventions to provide or protect some level of the rate," he added.
After the introduction of free currency conversion in early September, the volume of foreign currency sales on the foreign exchange market exceeded the volume of the purchase, he said.
In Uzbekistan, the liberalization of foreign exchange policy was launched in September. In particular, since September 5, 2017 individuals have the right to sell currency in exchange offices.
Since early September, banks have purchased foreign currency for $ 1.55 billion, including $ 644 million from individuals through exchange offices and $ 915 million from exporters (previously exporters handed over to banks an average of $172 million a month as part of the mandatory sale of foreign exchange revenue).
