The supply and demand of foreign currency enabled the National Bank of Moldova to continuously intervene in the market since the start of this year for sterilizing the inflows of currency that do not find a buyer and for increasing the central bank’s international reserves that declined, the Bank’s governor Sergiu Cioclea told a news conference, quoted by IPN.

“By the end of July, we bought about US$300 million that enabled us to augment the National Bank’s international reserves to almost US$2 billion. This is less than before their sudden decline. However, taking also into account the reduction in imports, the import covering coefficient increased to five months at present. Following interventions into the market, we also have a positive effect on the rise in monetary aggregates. The positive trend actually started in the first quarter of this year,” stated Cioclea.

The National Bank governor said that following the reduction in the base rate on the main monetary policy operations, the rate on loans provided by banks decreased. The average interest rate on loans is now 15%. Some of the loans, for example, for real estate purchases are released at an even lower interest rate.

“We haven’t yet seen a rise in the volume of new loans released because the monetary policy decisions are not transmitted immediately. Anyway, given the reduction in the base rate from 19% to 10% this year, we decided to take a small break and see how things develop,” said Cioclea.

As to the volume of deposits in lei, attracted by the Moldovan banks, this has increased. In July alone, the deposits rose by 2% on June to 26.7 billion lei. The average interest rate on deposits in lei is 12.3%.