A large part of the previous rise in the price of the US dollar has come as a result of speculation in the black market.
This wqs mainly due to a deficit in foreign exchange resources, Salwa al-Antari, an economist and former director of the research sector at the National Bank of Egypt, said.
Antari stressed that a large part of the demand for the dollar in the previous period was not really related to imports or Egypt’s payment of obligations in foreign currency, but rather based on speculation.
She explained that all this declined with the important measures taken by the government, which played a major important role in reducing speculation on black market.
She added that the measures taken by the Egyptian government will contribute significantly to providing hard currency in the Egyptian market.
Speculation
Decisions of the Central Bank of Egypt recently contributed to a noticeable decrease in the price of the dollar in the black market, where it reached LE33 at the end of 2022.
It declined to LE28 after CBE decisions.
The most prominent decisions taken by the Central Bank during the past days were the abolition of work with documentary credits and return to using collection documents, which greatly reduced the demand for dollars in the black market, at a time when hard currency was available with Egypt disbursing the first tranche of the International Monetary Fund loan.
While a number of experts expect that 2023 will be the year of recovery for the Egyptian currency against foreign currencies.
Egypt’s central bank hiked overnight interest rates by 300 basis points on Thursday, December 22, in an attempt to curb inflation rates.
The CBE’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) raised the deposit rate to 16.25 percent and its lending rate to 17.25 percent.
