BAKU, Azerbaijan, November 1. Foreign exchange reserves of the Central Bank of Azerbaijan (CBA) grew by 16.8 percent ($1.5 billion) over 10 months of this year and reached $10.5 billion, Trend reports via the CBA.
The Central Bank said it continues to implement anti-inflationary monetary and credit policies and measures to enhance its ability to influence inflation.
"Monetary and credit policy instruments are applied, taking into account the liquidity position of the banking system and the risk balance. Since August, maintaining mandatory reserves in accordance with new rules, the removal of the daily limit applied to the standing lending facility, and conducting regular auctions with various tenors for bills have allowed for the minimization of excess liquidity in the banking system," he noted.
"Overall, the size of the Central Bank's sterilization portfolio (including mandatory reserves in manat and the standing facility for sterilization) has grown by 3.9 billion manat ($2.29 billion) since the new monetary and credit policy framework came into effect (early September 2022), to 6.4 billion manat ($3.7 billion)," the bank explained.
"During the past 10 months, the weighted average interest rates on transactions between banks in the national currency, both in the unsecured and secured money markets, have responded to changes in the interest rate corridor. A significant achievement was the fact that interbank REPO rates were moved into the Central Bank's interest rate corridor for the first time. In October, the one-week interbank REPO rate (1W AINAIB) stood at 8.38 percent and formed within the interest rate corridor," the CBA added.
The CBA's foreign exchange reserves amounted to $9 billion in 2022, which was $1.9 billion (27 percent) more year-on-year.