Portfolio investors belonging to Hong Kong, USA, and Switzerland pulled out on July 28 a net amount of $1 million from their Special Convertible Rupee Accounts or SCRAs maintained with the authorised dealers (scheduled banks) in Pakistan.
Hong Kong withdrew $0.35 million followed by USA and Switzerland who withdrew $0.38 million and $0.25 million, respectively from their SCRAs. Another net withdrawal, yet of an insignificant amount, was made by Singapore so that the rounded figure of its balances in the SCRAs remained unchanged at $18.2 million on July 28.
UK also withdrew some $3.5 million, but an inflow of over $6 million more than offset the impact of this withdrawal so that its net inflow so far in the year improved from $1.9 million on July 26 to over $2.8 million on July 28.
The overall impact of the aforementioned net outflows/inflows was that balances in SCRAs stood reduced to $9.8 million on July 28 compared with $10.9 million on July 26. Individually, balances in SCRAs fell to $1.5 million on July 28 (from $1.9 million on July th) in the case of Hong Kong, to minus $2.5 million (from minus $1.9 million) in the case of USA and to minus $9.1 million (from minus $8.8 million) in the case of Switzerland. No other adverse or positive movement was observed in the case of any other country.
On the stocks front, the KSE-100 Index, which, due to some technical reasons unrelated to SCRAs, slipped for the first time in many days to 10,344 on July 26 picked up the next day to stand at 10,431 on July 27, but slipped again to 10,354 on July 28 due mainly to political uncertainty created by MQM ministers' resignations. The Index again rose to 10,498 on July 31. The aggregate market capitalisation also to over Rs 2,905 billion on July 31 following the somewhat erratic pattern followed by the KSE-100 index.
(Report by research.dept@ aaj.tv)