{"id":85462,"date":"2015-03-13T15:25:52","date_gmt":"2015-03-13T15:25:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/armbanks.am\/2015\/03\/13\/242510\/"},"modified":"2024-12-15T13:16:50","modified_gmt":"2024-12-15T13:16:50","slug":"share-of-deposits-in-usd-grows-by-4-2-p-p-to-almost-64-percent-central-bank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/armbanks.am\/en\/2015\/03\/13\/85462\/","title":{"rendered":"Share of deposits in USD grows by 4.2 p.p. to almost 64 percent \u2013 central bank"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>YEREVAN, March 13. \/ ARKA \/.<\/strong> The share of deposits in Armenian banks kept in US dollars grew last year by 4.2 percentage points from the previous year to 63.9%, the Central Bank said in its monthly bulletin for December 2014.<\/p>\n<p>The growth was prompted by a sharp devaluation of the Armenian national currency, the dram, in the last months of 2014 making people to convert their savings from the national currency to hard one.<\/p>\n<p>The trend affected largely demand deposits whose share in 2014 December fell by almost 10% to 180.5 billion drams, while demand deposits in USD grew by 6.6% to the equivalent of 846.7 billion drams.<\/p>\n<p>According to the Central Bank, the share of private demand deposits in USD in 2014 December made 74.4% of the total deposits growing by 3 percentage points from the previous month and by 3.2 percentage points from December 2013.<\/p>\n<p>The same trend was observed in 2009, when the share of deposits in USD grew from 44.1% in 2008 to 66.6% in 2009 March. That happened right after the Central Bank shifted to the so-called floating exchange rate policy. By the end of 2009 this indicator reached the historical high of 68.6%.<\/p>\n<p>In order to stabilize the foreign exchange market, in 2014 December the regulator increased the mandatory reserve requirement in foreign currency to 24%. Prior to that the minimum amount of reserve requirement for Armenian banks was 12% &#8211; 9% were to be in drams and 3% in US dollars. Today, the reserve requirement is lowered to 20%, but it still remains high.<\/p>\n<p>This decision caused a shortage of dram liquidity in commercial banks, resulting in higher interest rates. Thus, interest rates on deposits in drams rose to 16-18% from 13-14% a year earlier.<\/p>\n<p>Experts believe that large amount of imports (about 45% of GDP), private money transfers (17% of GDP) and high inflationary expectations of the people are\u00a0 the main obstacles to cutting the level of dollarization.-0-<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The share of deposits in Armenian banks kept in US dollars grew last year by 4.2 percentage points from the previous year to 63.9%, the Central Bank said in its monthly bulletin for December 2014<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":157940,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","tstyn_error":""},"categories":[12139,9216],"tags":[15865,12164,15419],"class_list":{"0":"post-85462","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy-en","8":"category-news","9":"tag-central-bank-2","11":"tag-growth-2"},"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/armbanks.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/armbanks.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/armbanks.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armbanks.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armbanks.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/armbanks.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85462\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armbanks.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/157940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/armbanks.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armbanks.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/armbanks.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}