Belarus’s gold and foreign exchange reserves continue to melt

Gold and foreign exchange reserves of the National Bank of Belarus (NBB) calculated by IMF standards were $3593.1mn on June 1, 2011.

The decrease reached 28.6% since the beginning of the year, the report of the National Statistics Committee says.

The country’s international reserves fell by 5.3% in May following a 0.9% growth in April and a 6.5% decrease in March.

As of June 1, exchange reserves (foreign cash and deposits in foreign banks) were $1321mn showing a 30.8% decrease during January-May. The fell in May was 8.3%.

Other reserve assets (repo transactions and short-term loans) dropped 86.4% during five months (the decrease in May was 37.3%) reaching $130.1mn on June 1.

Monetary gold reserves of the National Bank were $1550.9mn on June 1 having decreased by 3.1% during five months. The monetary equivalent of gold rose by 0.3% after a 10.5% growth in April.

SDRs were $591.1mn on June 1 demonstrating an increase of 4.1% for the period January to May 2011.

As reported earlier, the National Bank of Belarus suspended selling foreign cash to exchange offices since March 22 following its decision to restrain from exchange market interventions.

In April, Alyaksnadr Lukashenka emphasized repeatedly that the NBB’s strategic aim for 2011 was increasing the gold and foreign exchange reserves to 3-month import volume (9 or 10 billion dollars). The average monthly volume of import was $3.6bn in the first quarter of the year.

Since April 15, The National Bank, as the emitter of Belarusian rubles, stopped selling bars of precious metals (gold, silver, platinum) for the national currency, which was extremely popular among population.