The entire improvement taking place over the week was on account of SBP (up $160 million), as reserves with scheduled banks declined by $14 million to $2,488 million. It is worth recalling that liquid foreign exchange reserves of Pakistan which, on October 8, 2005, had slipped to below $12 billion mark for the first time in the last 13 months since September 2004, continued their slide in the following weeks to stand at $11.6 billion on October 22, 2005.
Earlier on, liquid foreign exchange had reached the coveted $13 billion mark on April 30, 2005, after hovering around $13 billion during April. The bounce-back in the current week appears to be the combined result of foreign exchange received from abroad under quake assistance and receipts of relatively larger amounts of remittances from expatriates to finance the extraordinary rehabilitation effort by relatives in the up-coming months.