The Serbian Dinar Stabilizes After a Bump in the Road

Belgrade, Dec.8th 2009 (Serbia Today) - Serbia recent bumps in the road on the international currency market appear to have stabilized according to National Bank of Serbia (NBS) Governor Radovan Jelasic. The Republic of Serbia Dinar (RSD) has been stable over the past few months against its bench mark currency the euro, but last week there was some slippage in value.
In a statement for Tanjug Jelasic evaluated that the upset does not constitute for "some kind of a trend", but rather a situation sometimes happening at the end of a year, and added that the Serbian dinar's fall was due to the reference rate decrease.
One euro is worth RSD 96.2 this Monday, but has been trading at less than 95 for weeks prior.
“Serbia has enough foreign exchange reserves to achieve the two main goals - not to have too big fluctuations on a daily basis and to make the foreign exchange market function, which already happened last weekend when a number of banks were buying foreign currencies with the Serbian dinar,” said Jelasic, reported the Serbian news service B92.
In Serbia’s favor is the fact that decades of economic difficulties have produce seasoned and hardened managers that have recently been garnering the respect of their European counterparts.
“Serbian managers are more accustomed to a tough political and economic environment,” says Oliver Roegl, head of Raiffeisen Bank Serbia for the past eight years. “People here are realistic when it comes to the crisis.”
The government underscored that the general level of the rate will be determined by the market and that the NBS will use its reserves, which now amount to more than EUR 10 billion, whenever it is needed.
The country’s young banking system, although now three-quarters foreign owned, remained comparatively from most of the global turbulence brought on by the global recession.
The central bank intervened last Friday, for the first time since February 25 this year, by selling EUR 42 million from the reserves, in order to prevent daily oscillations in the exchange rate, according to B92.