Dollar gets cheaper in exchange offices ahead of month-end, official rate continues to rise

On Tuesday, August 25, the National Bank set the following official rates: - US dollar – 44.7064 UAH (+0.0474 UAH to the official rate on Monday, August 24); - euro – 52.1594 UAH (-0.0898 UAH to the official rate on Monday, August 24).

The rates were set at 16:00 on August 24 and reflect the following trends:

1. On Monday, trading on the interbank currency market can be roughly divided into three stages. The first lasted literally 40 minutes at the start of trading, when the National Bank responded to a large number of buyers, came out with an intervention and sold about 100 million dollars in a short time. Then the NBU left the market for a while, and the second stage came, when quotes tried to rise, as there were clearly fewer sellers than buyers. However, no strong growth occurred, and until 14:00 trading was in a narrow range of 44.72–44.74 UAH. The average transaction price at 12:00 was 44.7123 UAH – 6 kopecks higher than on Friday. After 14:00, the National Bank appeared again and began to actively intervene. With its help, quotes briefly dipped to 44.57 UAH on the bid side. By the close of trading, the average transaction price decreased slightly, but was still higher than on Friday. Therefore, the National Bank raised the official dollar rate for the next day by 4.7 kopecks.

2. The euro on the international FOREX market corrected today after strong growth last week and managed to drop to 1.1660 dollars. At the time of fixing, the euro was sold at 1.16671 dollars – 32.5 pips lower than last Friday (1.16996 dollars). Therefore, despite the increase in the official dollar rate, the NBU lowered the official euro rate for tomorrow by almost 9 kopecks.

After the weekend, cash market prices went down amid falling demand for cash currency. In Kharkiv, the dollar fell by 5 kopecks, in Odessa – by 7, in Lviv – by 9, and in Kyiv and Dnipro – by 10 kopecks compared to last Friday. According to analysts of the portal "Kurs Ukrainy", the factor of the near end of the month and the proximity of September 1 gradually began to come into play: hryvnia was needed to repay loans and credit card debt, as well as to prepare schoolchildren and students for the upcoming academic year.