Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk is concerned about the weakening of the hryvnia in the past few days and calls for a meeting of the economic and financial stability council after the return of Ukrainian delegates led by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko from Davos, where they are on a visit on Jan. 20-22.
“I’d like this meeting to be immediately held jointly with the head of the National Bank of Ukraine and the entire economic bloc so that we could announce what steps need to be taken,” the prime minister said at a Cabinet meeting in Kyiv on Jan. 20.
According to him, the stability of the hryvnia is the priority issue on the agenda of the meeting.
“I won’t allow the situation which happened last year when we had to interrupt the Cabinet session to take on-the-spot decisions to stabilize the forex market. We and the National Bank see our goals the similar way: low inflation and the stable national currency. And everyone has his own level of responsibility,” the prime minister said.
He also said that the forex rate should correspond to the economic realities that exist in Ukraine today.
Further cooperation with the International Monetary Fund is one of the main tasks to support stability on the money and forex markets, he said.
As was reported, the hryvnia weakened by more than 5 percent in the past week, going down to the levels registered early in March 2015: its rate on the interbank market fell to Hr 25 per U.S. dollar, while the cash market exchanged the U.S. dollar for Hr 27. To curb the devaluation the National Bank held auctions to sell the currency: on Jan. 19 it raised the among put up for sale from $30 million to $50 million, and the forex rate of the hryvnia against the U.S. dollar on the interbank market strengthened slightly to around Hr 24.65.
