Serbia’s central bank bought nine tons of gold in October, raising its reserves of the precious metal on the advice of President Aleksandar Vucic.
Central Bank Governor Jorgovanka Tabakovic, a member of Vucic’s Progressive Party, said that the gold purchases raised the bank’s gold holdings to 10% of total reserves and made good on a suggestion from the president in May.
“We have completed gold purchase transactions and Serbia is safer today with 30.4 tonnes of gold worth around 1.3 billion euro,” Tabakovic told reporters in Belgrade on Thursday. “For now, we have no plans to buy more.”
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The acquisition is the latest in a series of moves by Serbia to shore up its financial stability by changing the structure of its foreign debt and increasing the share of dinars and euros, Tabakovic said. The central bank paid 395 million euro the gold, $1,503 an ounce, the governor said.
According to her, of the total amount of gold, 21 tonnes had been purchased from the Bor mine in the past while the remaining 9 tonnes were purchased from abroad.
The governor added that that was high-grade gold, averaging 99.1 per cent purity.
Tabakovic spoke after the bank upgraded its 2019 economic growth forecast to 3.6% from 3.5%, citing higher domestic demand that’s counterbalancing a slowdown in most of the European Union.
With some economists speculating that the central bank may alter the parameters of how it charts and controls the money supply, she said it won’t change its inflation target, which remains at 3% plus/minus 1.5 percentage point, through December 2021.
(Mondo, 14.11.2019)
https://mondo.rs/Info/Ekonomija/a1249321/Koliko-Srbija-ima-zlata.html
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