India’s foreign exchange reserves fell for a seventh straight week, dropping to $545.652 billion in the week to September 16, Reserve Bank of India’s weekly statistical supplement showed on Friday.
This is the lowest level since 2 October, 2020.
The foreign exchange reserves stood at $550.871 billion at the end of the previous week. In the week ending September 9, 2022, the reserves dropped by $2.2 billion. In the week ending September 16, the foreign currency assets stood at $484.901 billion, gold reserves at $38.186 billion and special drawing rights at $17.686 billion.
Though the fall in reserves is partly due to valuation changes, analysts believe a large part of the fall has been on account of the Reserve Bank of India’s intervention in the currency market to prevent the rupee from depreciating more sharply against dollar.
The Indian rupee today fell 41 paise to all-time low of 81.20 against US dollar in early trade on the back of US Treasury yields climbing to fresh multi-year highs and dollar demand from importers. The local currency was trading at 80.998 at 4 pm IST, and was trading at 80.856 vs dollar in the afternoon. Globally, the dollar has surged over the past few days as the US Fed has signalled a longer-than-expected tightening cycle. On Thursday, the rupee had suffered its biggest single session percentage decline since February, due to lack of aggressive intervention by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and a very U.S. hawkish Federal Reserve rate outlook, traders said.
The Indian stock market’s key indices, Nifty and Sensex, dropped by nearly 2 per cent on Friday, leading to an erosion of more than ₹4 lakh crore of investors’ wealth amid weak global cues after the US Federal Reserve signalled an aggressive increase in interest rate to control inflation.
