Kabul: Afghanistan’s central bank Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB) sold $14 million by auction on Sunday to stabilise the exchange rate of the national currency afghani, the bank said in a statement released here on Sunday.
The local currency afghani has been tumbling against foreign currencies, especially the US dollar, over the past couple of months. The exchange rate of 1 US dollar increased from last week’s 86 afghani to 87.15 afghani on Sunday, Xinhua news agency reported.
Afghanistan’s central bank has injected millions of US dollars into the country’s money-exchange market over the past month to prevent the fall of the afghani against foreign currencies.
Afghanistan has received more than 2 billion dollars in cash over the past 18 months as part of the international community’s humanitarian aid to prevent the economic collapse of the cash-strapped country.
Rajkot: Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal on Saturday expressed hope that traders will soon be able to settle foreign trade in the rupee currency as several banks from different countries are opening special Vostro accounts with Indian banks.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has approved 60 requests to open Special Rupee Vostro Accounts (SRVAs) of correspondent banks from 18 countries, including the UK, Singapore, and New Zealand.
The RBI, he said, is in discussion with the central banks of other countries on the matter. “We will soon start seeing operationalisation of this rupee trading in international trade with several countries,” Goyal told reporters here.
He also said that negotiations for free trade agreements (FTAs) with developed regions like the European Union, the UK, and Canada are in “advanced” stages.
Groups including European Free Trade Association Free Trade Agreement (EFTA), Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) are also keen to start talks for similar pacts with India.
“The whole world wants to have a comprehensive economic partnership agreement with India,” the minister said.
On the second phase of the production-linked incentive scheme for the textiles sector, he said that extensive stakeholder discussions have happened on the subject. “I am quite confident that very soon we will be able to finalise the contours of the scheme and take it up for approval at the highest level,” he added.
Goyal said that Indian textile exporters were earlier facing customs duty disadvantages in developed markets vis-a-vis countries like Bangladesh, but as the government is inking trade pacts with regions like the UAE and Australia, domestic exporters would be able to push shipments.
On promoting sustainability in the textiles sector, Goyal said that the textiles ministry has decided to set up an ESG (environmental, social, and governance commitments) task force.
The task force will come up with suggestions to make the sector more environment-friendly and sustainable.
The textiles ministry has also launched a portal to promote the sale of handicrafts and handloom products.
On the National Textiles Corporation, he said that viability and other issues of its units have been discussed with the Finance Ministry but no final decision has been taken yet.
On pink worms affecting cotton crops in certain places, the minister said that they are in discussion with the agri ministry and scientists to develop pink worm-resistant varieties.
On exports, Goyal said expressed confidence that the USD 100-billion target for the textiles sector would be achieved.
He also said working with industry would help take the industry’s combined domestic and international economic value to USD 250 billion. “It is possible. We will definitely achieve that,” he added.
Goyal was here as part of the Saurashtra Tamil Sangamam which is being conducted under the ‘Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat’ Initiative in Gujarat in Rajkot.
Noida: Noida Police on Tuesday said it has busted a fake currency racket here with the arrest of five people and seized counterfeit notes of the face value of around Rs 6.50 lakh ahead of local body polls in Uttar Pradesh.
According to police, the gang members were inspired by the popular web series ‘Farzi’ and used Instagram to connect with their network spread across Delhi-NCR, and parts of Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.
Additional DCP (Noida) Shakti Avasthy said the arrest has been made by officials of Sector 24 police station and the recovered banknotes include forged notes of denominations 2000, 500 and 200.
“The five people arrested are Faiz Khan, Shibu Khan, Aditya Gupta, Ayush Gupta and Hari Om Atri. They had a chain of network to supply fake notes. They got double the number of fake notes like Rs 200 in fake notes for Rs 100 real currency and the profit margin increased up to four times as one went higher up in the supply chain,” Avasthy told reporters.
“Three men were wanted in connection with the case. One of them has been identified as ‘Singhania’, who lives in Chhapra district of Bihar, and printed these notes, the other is ‘Bhola’, who stays in Delhi and the third goes by the name of ‘Mobin’ in Lucknow,” the officer said.
The police said the accused used WhatsApp with virtual phone numbers to evade tracking.
“They also used Instagram for networking and made reels related to fake currencies. They got in touch with their clients through comments on YouTube videos. They were also inspired by a web series which was released two to three months ago,” Avasthy said.
Of those held, Shibu had been working in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, while Faiz was in Kuwait until recently, the police said.
The police said the fake notes were being procured from “Singhania” in Bihar and “Bhola” in Delhi. Both of them were printing the fake notes, police said.
The main accused, Faiz Khan, lived in Kuwait and ran his business in Bihar, Lucknow, Noida, Jaipur and the Delhi NCR region, police officials said.
An FIR has been lodged under Indian Penal Code sections 420 (cheating) and provisions pertaining to counterfeit Indian currency notes, they added.
Beirut: The Lebanese currency (LBP) has collapsed to 100,000 LBP per US dollar for the first time in history as the country’s financial crisis and political deadlock continues.
The value of the Lebanese currency lost 8,000 pounds from two weeks ago when it stood at 92,000 pounds against the dollar, reports Xinhua news agency.
In 1997, the pound was pegged to the dollar at 1,500 LBP to $1, and the two were convertible until October 2019.
On February 1, the Central Bank of Lebanon shifted its long-standing official exchange rate from 1,507.5 LBP to 15,000 LBP against the dollar, but is still well below the real value of the dollar.
Lebanon’s economists have been calling on authorities to elect a new President and form a new cabinet to end the political deadlock and allow the country to implement necessary reforms and stop the collapse.
As U.S. banking regulators begin their post-mortem of Silicon Valley Bank, some pundits are pointing the finger at crypto markets, whose own collapse over the past year left the tech-focused lender hopelessly exposed.
The conventional wisdom about crypto is that it’s “self-referential” — a separate universe to conventional finance — and that its inherent volatility can be contained. The emerging “contagion” theory is that there are enough linkages for extreme turmoil to spill over, much as a virus can sometimes jump from one species to another.
That’s what happened here, according to Barney Frank, the former U.S. congressman who wrote sweeping new banking rules after the banking crisis in 2008, and joined the crypto-friendly Signature Bank as a board member in 2015.
“I think, if it hadn’t been for FTX and the extreme nervousness about crypto, that this wouldn’t have happened,” Frank told POLITICO this week. “That wasn’t something that could have been anticipated by regulators.”
FTX, the crypto exchange that collapsed in November amid allegations of massive fraud, capped a year of turmoil in crypto markets, as investors began withdrawing funds from riskier ventures in response to rising interest rates, which in turn exposed the shaky foundations underpinning the industry. The ensuing “crypto winter” saw the value of the industry plummet by two-thirds, from a peak of $3 trillion in 2021.
Policymakers sought to reassure the public that volatility in the crypto market, blighted by scams and charlatans who sought to profit from investors’ fear of missing out, would naturally be contained. With the collapse of SVB, that claim is facing its biggest test yet.
Patient zero
Under the contagion theory, “patient zero” could be traced back to the implosion of TerraUSD, an “algorithmic stablecoin” that relied on financial engineering to keep its value on par with the U.S. dollar. That promise fell short in May last year following a mass sell-off, creating panic among investors who had used the virtual asset as a safe haven to park cash between taking punts on the crypto market. The origin of the crash is still subject to debate but rising interest rates are often cited as one of the main culprits.
TerraUSD’s demise was catastrophic for a major crypto hedge fund called Three Arrows Capital, dubbed 3AC. The money managers had invested $200 million into Luna, a crypto token whose value was used to prop up TerraUSD, which had become the third largest stablecoin on the market. A British Virgin Islands court ordered 3AC to liquidate its assets at the end of June.
The fund’s end created even more problems for the industry. Major crypto lending businesses, such as BlockFi, Celsius Network and Voyager, had lent hundreds of millions of dollars to 3AC to finance its market bets and were now facing massive losses.
Customers who had deposited their digital assets with the industry lender were suddenly locked out of their accounts, prompting FTX — then the third largest crypto exchange — to step in and bail out BlockFi and Voyager. Meanwhile, central banks continued to raise rates.
The contagion seemed under control for a few months until revelations emerged in November that FTX had been using client cash to finance risky bets elsewhere. The exchange folded soon after, as its customers rushed to get their money out of the platform. BlockFi and Voyager, meanwhile, were left stranded.
Outbreak widens
This is the point where the outbreak of risk in the crypto industry might have jumped species into the banking sector.
Silvergate Bank and Signature Bank, two smaller banks that also failed last week, had extensive business with crypto exchanges, including FTX. Silvergate tried to downplay its exposure to FTX but ended up reporting a $1 billion loss over the last three months of 2022 after investors withdrew more than $8 billion in deposits. Signature also did its best to distance itself from FTX, which made up some 0.1 percent of its deposits.
FTX, the crypto exchange that collapsed in November amid allegations of massive fraud, capped a year of turmoil in crypto markets | Leon Neal/Getty Images
SVB had no direct link to FTX, but was not immune to the broader contagion. Its depositors, including tech startups, crypto firms and VCs, started burning their cash reserves to run their businesses after venture capital funding dried up.
“SVB and Silvergate had the same balance sheet structure and risks — massive duration mismatch, lots of uninsured runnable deposits backed by securities not marked to market, and inadequate regulatory capital because unrealized fair value losses excluded,” former Natwest banker and industry expert Frances Coppola told POLITICO.
Eventually, the deposit drain forced SVB to liquidate underwater assets to accommodate its clients, while trying to handle losses on bond portfolios and an outsized bet on interest rates. As word got out, the withdrawals turned into a bank run as frictionless and hype-driven as a crypto bubble.
Zachary Warmbrodt and Izabella Kaminska contributed reporting from Washington and London, respectively.
This article has been updated to correct the value of the crypto industry.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
New Currency Notes: Notes are issued by the Reserve Bank of India, but after the demonetisation across the country, many types of viral and fake news are coming out regarding the notes.
Now Punjab National Bank has brought a special offer for you, in which you will get brand new notes. The bank has given information about these notes by tweeting.
Have to contact in the nearest branch
PNB has written in its official tweet that if you also want to change old or mutilated notes, now you can do this work easily. The bank has told that you can contact your nearest branch. Here you can exchange notes and coins.
Rules issued by the Reserve Bank According to the new rules of the Reserve Bank, if you also have old or mutilated notes, then you do not have to worry at all. Now you can exchange such notes by visiting any branch of the bank. If any bank employee refuses to exchange your note, then you can also file a complaint about this. You have to keep in mind that the worse the condition of the note, the less its value decreases.
Under what circumstances will the notes be exchanged?
According to RBI, any torn note will be accepted only when a part of it is missing, or which consists of more than two pieces and is pasted together, provided that no essential part of it is missing. If some special parts of the currency note, such as the name of the issuing authority, guarantee and promise clause, signature, Ashoka Pillar, picture of Mahatma Gandhi, water mark, etc. are also missing, then your note will not be exchanged. Soiled notes which have become unusable due to circulation in the market for a long time can also be exchanged.
Such notes can be changed from the RBI office, very burnt notes, or notes sticking together can also be changed, but the bank will not take them, you will have to take them to the issue office of RBI. Remember that these things will definitely be checked by the institution that the damage to your note is genuine and not intentionally damaged.
Meerut: The All India Hindu Mahasabha on Sunday demanded that the image of Mahatma Gandhi on currency notes be replaced with that of V D Savarkar and other freedom fighters.
In an open letter to the Government of India, the Hindu Mahasabha also asked for renaming the road leading to the Parliament House after Savarkar.
Mahasabha leaders said this will be true tribute to Savarkar, a freedom fighter and former president of the Hindu Mahasabha, from the Modi government.
Savarkar’s 58th death anniversary was observed at the office of the Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha on Sharda Road by performing havan puja and rituals on Sunday.
Presiding over the programme, National Vice President of Hindu Mahasabha, Pandit Ashok Sharma said Savarkar was a great historical revolutionary in India’s freedom struggle.
Jammu, Feb 25: Police on Saturday arrested five persons from Kashmir Valley and New Delhi along with five lakh Indian currency notes and 2.15 crore “low quality” currency notes from near Kargil Colony Bathindi Jammu, officials said.
The five persons were arrested while they were moving in a Vehicle S-Cross (HR26CQ-8653) from Kargil Colony towards Bathindi morh, a police officer told GNS.
“After proper search of the Vehicle Police Party recovered 05 lac Indian currency notes notes alongwith 03 cheque books and about 02.15 Crore low quality Indian currency notes from their possession,” the officer said. In this regard, he said, a case (FIR No 71/2023) under relevant sections of law has been registered and further investigation is going on.
The five persons include Nazir Ahmed son of Mohammad Jabbar of Barzulla, Srinagar, Riyaz Ahmed son of Abdul Gani of Sheikhhar, Pulwama, Mohammad Naimullah son of Mohammad Zaheer-ul-Haq of Dwarka, Delhi, Manzoor Ahmed son of Ghulam Mohammad of Nishat, Srinagar and Basit son of Ghulam Hussain of Shopian. (GNS)
The U.K. has entered the international race to create a central bank-backed digital currency, with work to start on a “Britcoin.”
The Treasury and Bank of England said last week it is “likely” a digital pound will be needed in future for everyday payments.
“As the world around us and the way we pay for things becomes more digitalized, the case for a digital pound in the future continues to grow,” said Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey in a statement.
The BoE’s decision to enter the race comes as other central banks, like the ECB and the People’s Bank of China, plow ahead with their own plans for public digital currencies.
A joint consultation, which runs until June 7, paves the way for more detailed work on the exact design and puts the BoE on a similar trajectory to the ECB — which is considering bringing forward a digital euro.
But there are big questions over the use case for these digital banknotes, and how they would work in practice.
The House of Lords described the project last year as a “solution looking for a problem” and some BoE officials, like Andrew Hauser, have previously voiced concerns about the implications for monetary policy.
“A narrow digital currency that largely cannibalized banknote demand, for example, might have little or no impact. By contrast, a broad digital currency with many attractive payments features could materially increase the demand for central bank liabilities,” Hauser said in June last year.
Huw Van Steenis, who advised former BoE governor Mark Carney on his Future of Finance review in 2018, told POLITICO there were still more questions than answers related to the viability of a digital pound.
“Money is too important to be left [just] to central bankers as the big decisions are political and economic, not just technical,” he said, adding that most early pilots, such as those undertaken by the Nigerian and Bahamian central banks, and even that of China itself, were struggling to gain adoption.
Central bankers have been motivated to act on fears that Big Tech challengers could constrain universal public access to digital cash and with it the sovereignty and dominance of public money.
While ordinary people can already make online payments, those are done privately through banks or payments companies. The idea of a central bank digital currency is to create a digital version of cash that would operate as a public good that comes directly from the central bank.
U.K. citizens would be able to stash Britcoins in online wallets, but there would be initial limits to avoid pulling money out of banks | Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images
U.K. citizens would be able to stash Britcoins in online wallets, but there would be initial limits to avoid pulling money out of banks — amid fears that could threaten the stability of the financial system.
A digital pound would also not be totally anonymous to avoid fueling money laundering but users would be able to choose their private settings like for online ad-tracking on social media — and the government would not have access to private payment data. The data would, however, be available to police authorities.
Still, a decision on whether to go-ahead with a digital pound won’t take place until the middle of the decade.
Izabella Kaminska contributed reporting.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
