Foreign exchange market

South Korea and Japan shared "serious concerns" on the recent weakness of their currencies against the dollar and agreed to take "appropriate actions" to counter extreme volatility, the finance ministry in Seoul said Wednesday.

BELGRADE - Serbia's public debt rose by 26.3 bln dinars to 4,268.1 bln dinars (36.4 bln euros) in February, accounting for 47.8 pct of GDP.

According to figures released by the Public Debt Administration of the Serbian Ministry of Finance, foreign currencies accounted for 77.7 pct of the total public debt at end-February.

Amid a strengthening dollar fueled by robust U.S. economic indicators, the Japanese yen tumbled to its lowest level in 34 years. On Tuesday, the U.S. dollar surged to 151.97 yen, surpassing the previous multi-year peak set in October 2022. This surge has triggered concerns over Japan's currency stability, prompting Finance Minister Shunichi Suzuki to hint at potential intervention.

Egypt has secured an additional $5 billion in IMF loans, after the central bank hiked interest rates and allowed the pound to plunge by nearly 40 percent.

The Central Bank's decision to raise the key deposit rate to a record 27.25 percent caught the market by surprise.

The bank also committed to "allowing the exchange rate to be determined by market forces."

Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek has ruled out scenarios regarding the real depreciation of the Turkish Lira after the upcoming local elections.

"We do not have an exchange rate target. We are implementing a policy set which makes the lira attractive," Şimşek said in a televised interview on March 4.

The Pound/Dollar (GBPUSD) forecast for 2024, as projected by PandaForecast, paints a positive picture for the currency pair. Starting the year at 1.2780, the forecast anticipates an upward trajectory, reaching 1.32 by March. However, a reversal is expected in the last quarter, settling the pair back to 1.28.

As Bulgaria gears up for its much-anticipated integration into the Eurozone in 2025, the journey toward adopting the euro has sparked a mixed bag of expectations and uncertainties among both citizens and economic analysts.

The case for Europe has always rested on solving problems that countries could not address alone. After the Second World War, visionary leaders understood that the only way to secure peace on our continent was to unite our economies. And a united Europe would, in time, require a single currency to make the most of the economic benefits created by this peace dividend.

The Central Bank has said that it will maintain its reserve build-up strategy and ensure continuation of the stable uptrend in international reserves in 2024.

The Central Bank is not intervening in the foreign exchange market, Governor Hafize Gaye Erkan has said, pointing out that the increase in reserves is an indication of this.

"If there had been interventions in the U.S. dollar [in the FX market], reserves would have not increased that much," Erkan said in an interview with daily Hürriyet.