Indication of Recession Recovery? CBN Pumps $81.2M For SMEs As Volume of Transaction at NSE Surges

Following Friday’s injection of $389 million into the retail segment of the forex market, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) on Monday intervened with the sum of $81.2 million in the invisibles and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) segments.

CBN provided the sum of $44 million to meet customers’ requests for invisibles such as Basic Travel Allowances (BTA), Personal Travel Allowances (PTA), medical bills and tuition fees, among others.

The apex bank on Friday, May 5, 2017 sold a total sum of $389 million to authorized dealers in the retail sector of the market as spot and forwards.  Of the sum, $87.885 was for spot sales, while $300.8 million was sold as forwards in three tenors of 30, 45 and 60 days, respectively.

Meanwhile, the total volume of transaction at the Nigerian Stock Exchange significantly increased by 285% percent in March, 2017, according to data from the nation’s bourse.

The increase was from N74.11 billion recorded in February 2017 to N285.05 billion (about $0.93 billion) in March 2017.

Also, the aggregate value of transactions from January to March increased by 52.67% from N297.68 billion recorded in 2016 to N454.48 billion in 2017.

Similar to the month of February, domestic investor’s outperformed foreign investors by 7.02% in March 2017, an indication of growing financial literacy and improving investor confidence.

Domestic transactions increased by 285.49% from N39.57 billion recorded in February 2017 to N152.54 billion in March 2017.