UNIAN
The National Bank of Ukraine announced at a meeting on Tuesday with senior figures from the Ukrainian banking industry that it has made a decision to raise its discount rate from 19.5% to 30%, an UNIAN correspondent has reported, with reference to a source who attended the meeting.
"The discount rate will be 30%," the source said, without specifying the date when the rate will be increased. According to him, the regulator's decision will be made public soon.
As UNIAN reported earlier, on February 6, the NBU increased the discount rate to 19.5% from 14% due to the increase in consumer-price inflation to 24.9% at the end of 2014. The NBU also increased the rates under its active and passive transactions to regulate the liquidity of the market in order to reduce devaluation pressure on the currency market.
The tightening of central bank’s monetary policy is aimed at stabilizing the currency market and the hryvnia exchange rate, which in the past year depreciated against the dollar based on the official exchange rate by two times and then by a further 1.8 times since the beginning of the current year, hitting a new historic low of UAH 30.01 to the dollar. On March 2, the NBU set the official exchange rate at the level of UAH 26.8581 to the dollar.