Article Type

Article

Description

The critics of the present policy on reserve accumulation fall into three distinct categories. The first group consists of ‘I don’t accept’ type who do not wish to be bothered with any facts and for them this is simply juggling of statistics. They do not have any credibility in these numbers and don’t believe that the country has so much reserves. For them, I can only pray that Allah opens their minds and allows them to see some light. They can, if they choose to do so, verify the credibility of these statistics by looking at our weekly statements over the past 32 months particularly when we didn’t hesitate to announce publicly in October2000 that SBP reserves were down to $ 995 million only. It is also a widely known fact that it was the Annual Report of SBP for 1999-2000 which disclosed, for the first time, a complete and comprehensive picture of the country’s external debt and liabilities including the Military Debt and has been publishing the updated data every year since then. We also regularly publish all the inflows and outflows of foreign exchange received or paid by the country. For greater transparency we have for the first time since April 2001, begun to segregate the SBP deposits from those of our banking system. As the banks were allowed to retain these deposits and to manage them on their own in the best 2 interest of their customers, it was essential that these should be disclosed separately. This has assured resident and non-resident Pakistanis that the risk of freezing their deposits due to mandatory surrender requirement to SBP has been eliminated and they can safely deposit their foreign currency in Pakistani banks. But even despite such transparency and disclosure if this group dismisses the numbers we can’t do very much to reassure them.

Publication Source

Dawn

Publication Date

8-1-2002

Pages

1-22

Notes

Reproduced form Daily DAWN, Karachi: August 1, 2 and 3 2002.

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