PRESS RELEASE
Bank of Albania interventions in the money market and foreign exchange market over 2013 Q4

Money market interventions during the fourth quarter of 2013 consisted of open market operations for injecting liquidity and permanent operations for structuring Bank of Albania's portfolio.

The total amount of injected liquidity averaged ALL 16.05 billion from ALL 17.38 billion in the third quarter 2013. Average injected liquidity for the last quarter saw minimum volatility compared to a year earlier, when it amounted to ALL 16 billion.

To inject liquidity, the Bank of Albania employed its main instrument, the one-week reverse repurchase agreement - on average, ALL 11.43 billion a week* - and one-month reverse repurchase agreement - on average, ALL 1.92 billion a week*. In the last week of the year, besides one-week and one-month operations the three-month reverse repurchase agreement instrument was used. The overnight injection operation was used only once to adjust the amount of liquidity in the system on the last days of the required reserve maintenance period, on 20.12.2013.

To structure BoA's portfolio, aiming to lower the participation in T-bills up to 70% of total issue, during the last quarter of 2013, the Bank of Albania intervened four times in the open market, to purchase 12-month newly issued T-bills, hence completing the lowering of re-investment in the primary market in 6-month T-bills for the amount of ALL 400 million and the net decrease of the portfolio carried forward from the previous quarter for ALL 40 million.