More Than $250 Million: Kazakhstan's Gold and Foreign Exchange Reserves Change

In October, $253 million was sold from the National Bank of Kazakhstan's gold and foreign exchange reserves. This is part of the asset conversion operation the National Bank utilized after purchasing shares of Kazatomprom, Orda.kz reports.

The National Bank's report on the currency market situation specifies that the tenge exchange rate weakened again in October. The dollar rose to 488.23 tenge, or by one and a half percent in a month. The trading volume on KASE in October increased from 222 to 278 million dollars on average per day and amounted to 6.1 billion dollars for the month as a whole.

Last month, over 1.3 billion dollars were sold from the National Fund to ensure transfers to the republican budget. The ENPF investment portfolio stopped purchasing currency on October 10 since the volume of the pension fund's foreign currency assets reached 40%.

According to the National Bank's forecast, $130-140 million will be sold from gold and foreign exchange reserves in November. To ensure transfers to the Republican budget, they will sell another $1.2 to $1.3 billion from the National Fund. They are not planning to purchase currency for the needs of the ENPF next month.

Original Author: Nikita Drobny