{"id":63525,"date":"2017-02-18T17:15:18","date_gmt":"2017-02-19T00:15:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=63525"},"modified":"2017-02-18T17:15:18","modified_gmt":"2017-02-19T00:15:18","slug":"sri-lanka-fears-balance-of-payments-under-pressure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2017\/02\/18\/sri-lanka-fears-balance-of-payments-under-pressure\/","title":{"rendered":"Sri Lanka fears balance of payments under pressure"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em>Courtesy The Gulf Today<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>COLOMBO: Sri Lanka could face balance-of-payments pressure due to foreign outflows from government securities, a government document showed, even as the island nation is in the process of raising up to $2.5 billion from foreign borrowing.<\/p>\n<p>The central bank is aiming to tap the international market for up to $1 billion through a syndicated loan and up to $1.5 billion via a sovereign bond.<\/p>\n<p>A document submitted by the Finance Ministry this week for the approval of the sovereign bond said a possible US rate hike, exchange rate volatility, and rising domestic interest rates could induce foreigners to sell government securities prematurely to minimise any capital losses\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>The total net foreign outflow from the government securities in 2016 was $324.3 million, while offshore investors have sold a net 22 billion rupees ($146 million) worth of securities in January alone, the document seen by Reuters showed.<\/p>\n<p>If this continues expected level of foreign investment in T-bills and T-bonds would not be materialised,\u201d it said. As a result, foreign investment in T-bonds and T-bills is expected to be further withdrawn by foreign investors in 2017, creating pressure on the balance of payments by a net foreign currency outflow.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake said the foreign outflow was mainly due to sell off by a single US-based foreign fund.<\/p>\n<p>The Finance Ministry has said the economy has recovered after facing BOP and debt crisis in 2015 with $1.5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved last year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Courtesy The Gulf Today COLOMBO: Sri Lanka could face balance-of-payments pressure due to foreign outflows from government securities, a government document showed, even as the island nation is in the process of raising up to $2.5 billion from foreign borrowing. The central bank is aiming to tap the international market for up to $1 billion [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63525","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=63525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63525\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}