UAH retreats at the auction into weaker territory

Макроэкономика 22.10.2015 Sellers of US dollars to the NBU visibly increased their quotations and beyond to the NBU's psychological threshold of 22/USD. Yesterday, sellers were testing whether the NBU would weaken the FX rate to 22.6/USD. Sellers' applications rose nearly three-fold from US$12m per day before towards US$35m yesterday. This suggests that there was some communication between private sector banks and the NBU a day before yesterday on the expected FX rate path into weaker to beyond 22/USD. Previously, the NBU governor announced to the media that the bank would not resist market pressure to move the FX rate. Likely, sellers had just received confirmation once again from the central bank over the past couple of days, causing applications to increase towards US$35m. In the end, the NBU bought US$16.3m at a FX weighted average rate of 22.6450/USD. This rate was 2.6% lower than the previous day's auction.