Posts Tagged ‘Shekel’
Bank of Israel Steps up Intervention on Shekel
Saturday, August 8th, 2009Ended the last year, Israel has softly amassed one of the world’s largest repositories of foreign exchange reserves. On the average, the Central Bank of Israel has bought $100 million worth of Dollars day-to-day since July 2008, bringing its total reserves to $52 Billion. The Bank’s goals are twofold: to sterilize the inflow of speculative money pouring into Israel in order to mitigate inflation, and to stem the appreciation of the Shekel.
Towards this latter, the Bank received a hike by the credit crisis, which caused an outbreak of risk aversion and sent investors rushing to shift funds into so-called safe haven countries/currencies. As a result, the Israeli stock market tanked, and the Shekel plummeted 30% in a matter of months. (more…)
