Bangladesh Bank reverts to half-yearly monetary policy

The next policy will be announced in January, ending the current one halfway through its term

Bangladesh Bank has decided to roll out the next monetary policy in January, ending the current one halfway through its term.

The central bank had long been announcing monetary policy two times every year, but the last governor, Fazle Kabir, changed its tenure to one year in 2019.

An International Monetary Fund team, during recent talks in Dhaka on Bangladesh’s request for $4.5 billion loans, suggested the central bank should announce the monetary policy for a short period considering volatility and unpredictability of the global economy amid the Russia-Ukraine war.

As Bangladesh is also under pressure over a crisis of dollars and rising inflation due to the global situation, the central bank has started reviewing the outgoing monetary policy with an aim to make a new one,

Habibur Rahman, chief economist at the central bank, said they were taking economists’ views to set the new policy. Governor Abdur Rouf Talukder sat with the economists on Monday.