Finance Minister Ishaq Dar on Wednesday ruled out the need for any particular supportive measures for the rupee, stoking optimism among traders that the \u2018Darnomics\u2019 will soon be able to crack the country\u2019s monetary conundrum.
\n\u201cThe rupee has been heavily undervalued,\u201d Dar said during an interview with Bloomberg in Washington, where he has been attending annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
\n\u201cIt is due to speculation \u2014 and some players in the market have been responsible for that,” he said.
\n\u201cI thank those players in the market who have realised that that game at the cost of the national currency will not continue,\u201d he asserted while highlighting that the exchange rate stabilised after traders learned he would take office.
\nDar, who has been the finance minister three times previously, said investors understand that \u201cI fix these things.\u201d
\nResponding to a query if he was planning to take any “specific steps” to boost the rupee, he said: \u201cI don\u2019t think so. We don\u2019t have the luxury of physically spending foreign exchange \u2014 it\u2019s very scarce at the moment.”
\nHe was upbeat that the economy would expand by more than the around 2% pace projected by the State Bank of Pakistan. \u201cMaybe over 3%. I don\u2019t want to be giving a big hope, but I\u2019m fairly confident,\u201d he said.
\nDar reiterated that \u201cthere\u2019s no plan to engage with bondholders across the board,\u201d asking them to extend the maturity date for Pakistan\u2019s $1 billion global bond due in December.
\n\u201cThere are certain proposals,\u201d that Islamabad might consider, including issuing \u201creplacement paper,\u201d but the approach is to look at optional, not mandatory, measures, he said.
\n\u201cI\u2019m working to have a solid plan for how to deal with all these public debt liabilities\u201d that will be due in the fiscal year to June 2023,” he said. In the next 12 months, there\u2019s around $22 billion coming due, the finance czar concluded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Finance Minister Ishaq Dar on Wednesday ruled out the need for any particular supportive measures for the rupee, stoking optimism among traders that the \u2018Darnomics\u2019…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1919,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1918\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}