The Egyptian Currency

Bloomberg said that the devaluated Egyptian pound was insusceptible to the plummet that faced Turkish and Argentine currencies, leaving them at low records.

It commented that Egypt’s pound has barely moved in the past four months.

“The pound also held its own even as Egyptian Treasury bills suffered outflows of at least $4 billion since March,” it said.

Economic Reforms

The tough measures Egypt took to stabilize the economy are paying off the debt market, according to the report, resulted in raising the country’ credit rating by S&P Global Ratings in May.

“While a recent sell-off in the country’s debt may have irked some investors, others, including TCW Group Inc. and Union Investment Privatfonds GmbH., find the currency’s stability and its relatively high yields attractive,” it added.

Despite the outflows, “we are encouraged that there were no reports of dollar shortages,” said Brett Rowley, the Los Angeles-based managing director for emerging markets at TCW.

In a response to the flow cut of dollar in the back of 25th revolution, Egypt resorted to liberalize its currency in November 2016 as part of an International Monetary Fund deal for a $12 billion loan to support its recovery and end the hard-currency crunch.

In November 2016, the Executive Board of the IMF approved a $12 billion loan as a financial assistance for Egypt to support the Egyptian economic reform program.

Upon the board’s approval in November, Egypt floated its currency, losing around 50 percent of its value as part of the economic reform program which imposed taxes, including the value-added tax (VAT), and cut energy subsidies, all with the aim of trimming the budget deficit.

While the pound lost half its value after the float, a central-bank mechanism that guarantees investors’ ability to take money out of the country has limited the currency’s fluctuations, the IMF said in an email response to Bloomberg’s questions. That’s because when investors bring in hard currency, the central bank keeps the money in a special account, and then sells the cash back to foreigners on their way out.

According to IMF, Strong growth in inflows from tourism and remittances have also helped offset fund outflows in recent months, expecting the Central Bank of Egypt to keep the interest rates at 16.75 percent during August.

In the period from July 2017 to April 2018, remittances jumped 48.2 percent year-on-year to reach a record of $26 billion, compared to $17.5 billion in the same period of the previous year, CBE data showed earlier.

On Thursday, the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of CBE kept interest rates unchanged Thursday for the third time this year, setting the overnight deposit rate and the overnight lending rate at 16.75 percent and 17.75 percent, respectively.

“The government will, in my opinion, stick with orthodox policies,” said Shahzad Hasan, an emerging-market debt manager at Allianz in London. “That means overall capital inflows should hold up well.”

Bloomberg said that Egypt’s current-account deficit for the July 2017 to March 2018 period narrowed 58 percent to $5.3 billion as remittances from Egyptian expatriates and tourism receipts rose by over 40 percent to about $27 billion.

The Repatriation Mechanism

According to three people familiar with the matter, who asked to be unanimous, CBE raised the cost of using the mechanism last year, pushing more investors to exit using the open market and boosting demand for dollars.

They clarified that the solid supply of hard currency in the inter-bank market helped keep the pound stable over the past few months as investors sought to exit.

“The repatriation mechanism still shields the pound from sharp fluctuations, even though raising its cost is the reason why the pound has started witnessing more volatility,” said Mohamed Abu Basha, director of macro analysis at investment bank EFG-Hermes in Cairo.

The report displayed that the Egyptian currency witnessed its highest volatility period in May for 10 days, recording a decline of 1.3 percent, noting that it’s the most decrease since the devaluation.