Biz-Econ

BB to announce new monetary policy on Jan 29

Bangladesh Bank (BB) is likely to announce its Monetary Policy Statement (MPS) for the second half of the financial year 2016-17 (FY17) on January 29."We`re going to launch MPS for January-June period of FY17 on January 29," a senior BB official told BSS here today. He said the monetary policy is being prepared to give special importance to various sectors, including investment, Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) and idle money in the banking system, to help accelerate growth and investment."The central bank will stick to its cautiously accommodative stance in the MPS, which will be constant to the previous policy directives," said BB sources.On July 26 in 2016, the central bank unveiled MPS for the first half of the FY17 when governor Fazle Kabir made it clear that the MPS would pursue cautiously accommodative stance in credit expansion to keep inflation at a comfortable level.In the MPS, the central bank projected 16.5 percent credit growth to private sector while the overall credit growth was targeted at 16.4 percent.The MPS for January-June period for FY17 would maintain the similar stand, with adopting cautious and restrained monetary stance and ensuring adequacy of credit growth, but avoiding excessive monetary expansion, said the BB official.