{"id":133564,"date":"2023-04-07T16:52:07","date_gmt":"2023-04-07T23:52:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=133564"},"modified":"2023-04-07T16:52:07","modified_gmt":"2023-04-07T23:52:07","slug":"sri-lanka-fx-reserves-jump-to-2-69-billion-in-march-on-imf-aid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2023\/04\/07\/sri-lanka-fx-reserves-jump-to-2-69-billion-in-march-on-imf-aid\/","title":{"rendered":"Sri Lanka FX Reserves Jump to $2.69 Billion in March on IMF Aid"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em><span class=\"author\">Anusha Ondaatjie<\/span>, Courtesy\u00a0 <span class=\"source\">Bloomberg News<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n<p>(Bloomberg) &#8212; Sri Lanka\u2019s foreign exchange reserves grew in March to the highest in over a year after the South Asian nation clinched a $3 billion International Monetary Fund bailout.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The stockpile increased to $2.69 billion from $2.22 billion in February, according to data released by the central bank on its website. The reserves include a swap facility from the People\u2019s Bank of China equivalent to about $1.4 billion, which helped lift reserves to a previous high of $3.14 billion in December 2021, even though it has conditions on usability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>On March 20, the IMF board approved the 48-month loan program and subsequently disbursed about $333 million as a first tranche, which helped to stabilize Sri Lanka\u2019s economy and let the nation begin restructuring its debt. The endorsement by the Washington-based lender is expected to unlock more funding and provide a reform framework to enable the island nation to recover from its worst economic crisis in decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Improving investor sentiment has also boosted the local currency, while rising worker remittances and tourism has helped ease balance-of-payments constraints after the nation last year ran out of dollars to pay for essentials, including food, fuel and medicines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Sri Lanka last month took a key step toward winning the cooperation of its external bondholders for restructuring $84 billion in debt by agreeing to include local-currency bonds in the program. The exercise, which will include the shorter term Treasury bills held by the nation\u2019s central bank as well as some longer-term Treasury bonds, is intended to reduce the burden on foreign commercial creditors by providing the concessions needed for Sri Lanka to achieve debt sustainability.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Anusha Ondaatjie, Courtesy\u00a0 Bloomberg News (Bloomberg) &#8212; Sri Lanka\u2019s foreign exchange reserves grew in March to the highest in over a year after the South Asian nation clinched a $3 billion International Monetary Fund bailout. The stockpile increased to $2.69 billion from $2.22 billion in February, according to data released by the central bank on [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133564\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}