India rupee outpaces Asian peers on fresh FX curbs, RBI intervention

MUMBAI: The Indian rupee outperformed its regional peers on Tuesday, boosted by new central bank measures to alleviate pressure on the Asian currency and likely spot market intervention that magnified their impact.

The Indian currency rose to a peak of 95.0725 per dollar in early trading before trimming gains to settle at 95.28, up 0.5% from the previous close.

The Reserve Bank of India has taken a series of tough regulatory steps aimed at supporting the rupee by re-routing oil dollar demand to a special facility, imposing margins on hedging current account liabilities and banks’ hedging their own assets and liabilities.

The regulator has also told banks to offer non-deliverable contracts to clients only for protecting underlying exposures and slashed the size of derivative transactions users can undertake without underlying exposure to $5 million from $100 million.

The tough curbs and heightened scrutiny have rattled banks and triggered unintended consequences such as widening of bid-ask spreads in the forwards market and a migration of activity into the non-deliverable forward market.

Analysts expect the regulatory steps to help steady the rupee even as the underlying balance of payments picture for India remains challenging.

“The measures should support INR in the near term by reducing USD demand while making it more difficult to take derivative positions,” Union Bancaire Privee said in a note.

“Markets increasingly view USD/INR 97.00 as a level the RBI is prepared to defend.”

The dollar index was down 0.2% at 102.3 while Asian currencies were largely range bound.

Oil prices were on track for their first decline in nearly a week as traders weighed the prospect of additional diesel supplies from Russia.