Nigeria's naira hovered near a record intraday low in thin trade on Wednesday after a delayed start while currency dealers met to assess market conditions and liquidity,Reuters reports
Interbank traders began business about an hour late after discussing how to stabilise the naira and offer more efficient two-way quotes, they told Reuters.
As trading opened, the naira fell to a record intraday low of 191.97 to the dollar, recovering to 190.45 naira by 1220 GMT. It had closed at a record low of 189.20 the previous day, before a central bank decision on interest rates.
No central bank official attended the meeting called by the Financial Market Dealers Association (FMDA), an association of lenders, discount houses and investment banks, dealers said.
"We know that liquidity is tight ... there's a lot of engagement with the central bank. We discussed events that have happened in the past one week," one of the dealers who attended the meeting told Reuters.
Dealers said they also discussed Nigeria's dependence on foreign currency to import for almost 80 percent of what it consumes.
Last week JP Morgan said it was re-assessing Nigeria's inclusion in its emerging market bond index, putting a question mark over one of the few non-oil sources of government funding.
On Tuesday, the central bank kept its policy rate at 13 percent, offering no new measures to deal with a record low currency and inflationary risks linked to a collapse in world oil prices.
Instead the governor noted that the naira was "appropriately priced" and warned speculators.
The bank has struggled to keep the naira in a new trading range since devaluing it by 8 percent against the dollar in November in an effort to halt a slide in its reserves.
No comments:
Post a Comment