International reserves will exceed USD 29 billion in 2020, and will continue to rise in the coming years. In this light, the NBU believes any delay in entering into a new cooperation agreement with the IMF to be the key risk to its forecasts. Risks to macrofinancial stability also persist.
As other central banks have bought government bonds under quantitative easing programs they pushed down the yields on those bonds. In turn, this put downward pressure on the value of their currencies. As a result, here in Australia we found ourselves in the position of having relatively high longer-term bond yields compared with other countries, despite the short-term policy rate being similar across countries.