Dollar loses 10-12 piasters in black market

Agreement on exchange firms supporting CBE's efforts to control exchange markets and banks obtaining Arab currencies in exchange for dollar

Exchange firms pledged to support the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) in its efforts to restore order in exchange market and end the lack of dollar crisis. This was during the meeting of CBE's Sub-Governor Banking Supervision Unit Tarek Fayed with a number of exchange firms' leaders on last Monday. The meeting took place in the Federation of the Egyptian Chambers of Commerce (FEDCOC) and Chairman Ahmed El-Wakeel and Head of General Division of Exchange Firms Mohamed El-Abyad attended the meeting.
The dollar lost 10-12 piasters against the pound at the black market in the past two days, registering EGP 8.65 buying price and EGP 8.68 selling price compared to EGP 8.77 buying price and EGP 8.78 selling price on Sunday. The dollar price registers at the official market EGP 7.8086 buying price and EGP 7.8301for selling.
El-Abyad told Daily News Egypt in a special statement that the meeting discussed the developments the exchange market goes through and the dollar's speculations, which pushes its price against the pound to high levels every so often.
The officials of exchange firms pledged to CBE's Sub-Governor to support CBE in its efforts to eliminate the dollar crisis and they pledged not to speculate on its price and to commit to the prices determined in cooperation with banks.
"The firms informed CBE of their idea about how to benefit from them in this critical period and about the factors that can attract more dollars to the official market," El-Abyad said. The exchange firms have huge amounts of Arab currencies and they suffer not being able to sell them, the banks were not accepting taking these currencies from the firms in exchange for dollar.
CBE's Sub-Governor promised the exchange firms that the banks will accept these currencies and grant them their value in dollar. In addition, he promised them that the exchange firms will participate in the dollar interbank mechanism when activated. T he meeting concluded by recommending that all bodies in the state must join together to overcome these hardships.
As for the recent dollar movements, CEO of one of the large exchange firms, Wael Badawy, said that in late January, there was a high demand for the dollar at both the exchange firms and the black market after CBE's decision to raise the dollar deposit cap to $250,000 monthly.
He said that a significant number of importers were trying to benefit from this decision during the last two days of January, which led to significant increase in the dollar's price at the black market.
Most of the importers believed that raising the foreign exchange deposit cap is applied on all importers. However they found that it goes only for the basic commodities' importers and so they did not buy dollar, which decreased its price again.
Badawy said the presidential decision of raising customs on approximately 500 commodities caused many importers of these commodities lose interest in dollar, which they do not want to import. This furthered the decline in the dollar's price on the black market.