VNBusinessNews – The widening gap in the forex rate between commercial banks and the unofficial market has drained U.S. dollars from the lenders, prompting a shortage of the greenback to make loans for exporters, bankers said on Thursday.

An executive of BIDV’s transaction office in HCMC told the Daily how his bank could not satisfy legitimate corporate demands for dollars.

“An enterprise who had borrowed money in the U.S. dollar at the bank before and now wanted to buy dollar from the bank to service the earlier debt. However, we do not have dollars to sell them,” the executive said.

He also said that some banks now had to ink option contracts to buy or sell the U.S. dollar at prices higher than official quotations for immediate delivery, which is a bypass to have dollars quickly while still not breaking the central bank’s rule.

Meanwhile, Nguyen Phuoc Thanh, general director of Bank for Foreign Trade of Vietnam (Vietcombank), said that the U.S. dollar source was drying up at the bank.

“The reason is that exports are falling, this reducing the dollar inflow. Furthermore, people expect Vietnam dong will depreciate against the U.S. dollar in the coming time, and choose to keep the foreign currency,” he said.

In addition, enterprises now borrow money in Vietnam dong instead of the U.S. dollar to import materials given the Government’s rate support for loans in the local currency. They then convert the money into the foreign currency to buy big volumes of materials, making the demand for the dollar to strongly rise at this point of time.

However, Thanh said Vietcombank can manage to meet enterprises’ legal demand on dollar.

Nguyen Duc Huong, general director of LienVietBank, said that in fact almost all banks are now in difficulty in securing sufficient dollar funds. He also said that his bank was lucky as it had bought the greenback in the past.

Commercial banks since early this year have quoted the same price for buying and selling the U.S. dollar, which was VND17,486 on Thursday, the highest permissible level or 3% higher than the inter-bank rate announced by the central bank.

Meanwhile, the greenback was bought at around VND17,600-17,750 and sold at VND17,800-17,850 on the black market. (SGT)