All of the na­tion's 12 au­tho­rised deal­ers of for­eign ex­change yes­ter­day be­gan sell­ing US dol­lars to the pub­lic at an ex­change rate of $6.43 to US$1, the low­est ex­change rate since June 12, 2014, ac­cord­ing to T&T Guardian analy­sis of Cen­tral Bank ex­change rate da­ta.

The deal­ers are: Sco­tia­bank; Bank of Bar­o­da;Citibank; First Cit­i­zens Bank; Re­pub­lic Bank; RBC Roy­al Bank; In­ter­com­mer­cial Bank; ANSA Fi­nance/Mer­chant Bank; De­vel­op­ment Fi­nance Ltd; First­Caribbean In­ter­na­tion­al; Massy Fi­nance GFC Lim­it­ed and NCB Glob­al Fi­nance Ltd.

Bankers told the T&T Guardian that the Cen­tral Bank en­gi­neered yes­ter­day's rate at $6.43–which rep­re­sents a de­pre­ci­a­tion of over 1 per cent from Thurs­day–be­cause the Cen­tral Bank de­ter­mines the price that it sells US dol­lars to the au­tho­rised deal­ers.

The slip­page of the US dol­lar sell­ing rate comes one work­ing day af­ter the Cen­tral Bank is­sued a state­ment that it had in­ject­ed US$500 mil­lion in­to the lo­cal for­eign ex­change mar­ket in or­der to clear off the queues.

In the state­ment, the Cen­tral Bank re-es­tab­lished the for­eign ex­change al­lo­ca­tion sys­tem that was in place be­fore April 1, 2014, and en­sured le­git­i­mate trade-re­lat­ed de­mand for for­eign ex­change was met.

In do­ing so, the Cen­tral Bank con­formed with spe­cial di­rec­tives is­sued by Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Colm Im­bert in ac­cor­dance with pow­ers grant­ed to him by the Ex­change Con­trol Act at a meet­ing on Oc­to­ber 26.

Im­bert first ar­tic­u­lat­ed those di­rec­tives as "re­quests" in his pre­sen­ta­tion of the 2016 bud­get speech, in which he in­di­cat­ed that the Cen­tral Bank would al­so have been di­rect­ed to en­sure the sta­bil­i­ty of the ex­change rate.

The Cen­tral Bank state­ment, is­sued on Oc­to­ber 30, con­formed with three of the four ac­tion items men­tioned in the bud­get speech but the state­ment made no men­tion of en­sur­ing ex­change rate sta­bil­i­ty.

The Bank's spokesper­son did not re­spond to a re­quest for clar­i­fi­ca­tion on Fri­day on whether the omis­sion of the ref­er­ence to ex­change rate sta­bil­i­ty was de­lib­er­ate.